Games That Weren't^®

1983 Spectrum Games

Platform: Commodore Vic 20

Monster Muncher was a simple Pac Man clone due for release on the Commodore Vic 20 by Spectrum Games back in 1983, and was fully advertised too. The ZX Spectrum version was known to see release and had been available for some time – though the VIC 20 edition was missing.

What is particularly interesting about this title is that it was written by Matthew Smith of Manic Miner fame, and took a few hours or so to write. According to Matthew, he sold the game to a few people himself, but that was it. Though accounts change slightly in a different interview with Matthew.

Thanks to an interview with Paul Drury at Nottingham’s Screenplay Festival in February 2005, we learn more about the origins of the game…

Not long after having his very first game published – Delta Tower One on the TRS-80 – Matthew visited a business man with a friend who was looking to put adverts in magazines for four games. The adverts were put in apparently before the games were even written, and Matthew was roped into producing Monster Muncher on the VIC 20 to help out (a blatant Pacman clone).

According to Matthew – the game was written in BASIC and was the result just three hours of work. He described that his friend had ripped off a Defender game, which he suggested was Alligata’s Defender with the graphics changed slightly and the credits removed.

This seems to suggest that his friend did Rocket Command for them on the ZX Spectrum, which matches the description perfectly – but it was found to be instead a rip off of Silversoft’s Orbiter from 1982. It wasn’t clear therefore if the Spectrum Games release ever made it out at all for Matthew’s version of the game.

Some years ago (2014 to be precise), David Selwood kindly loaned GTW a copy of Road Frog for the Vic 20 which hadn’t been preserved and was the only copy we had seen. It was likely that there were copies out there to be found of Monster Muncher – so we lived in hope.

In August 2024 – confirmation was made that the game had seen a very limited release. A copy surfaced on eBay, but with a £500 starting price. Eventually that dropped to about £200, and a friend of Games That Weren’t offered to try and bid on it. Sadly they missed out, and there was no response from the purchaser to see about preserving.

As a result, we feared that the game could be lost forever due to its scarcity – though there was to be a dramatic (and perhaps bizarre) twist…

On the 7th September, I visited the Retro Computer Museum in Leicester with Sean Connolly (who many will know from his wonderful Commodore 64 music). Up in their vast and amazing library upstairs, they had a set of shelves with VIC-20 titles on, about 3 cassettes deep in one part.

Whilst standing there and chatting to others at the event, I just started wondering to myself about how it would be amazing if Monster Muncher was sitting there tucked away.

I began to sift through, and just one layer of cassettes behind – the words “Monster Muncher For Any VIC 20” smacked me in the face. Not sure if I have some bizarre 6th sense, but I was pretty gobsmacked – and I had only just told the story about the game minutes before I started looking in amongst the cassettes.

Thanks to Andy Spencer, we were allowed to borrow the tape to ensure it was properly preserved – so here it is.

As you will see – the game is quite impressive for only a few hours worth of work, but the flaws do show unfortunately. Although it plays a reasonable game of Pac Man – there are some game breaking issues throughout. Parts where your character gets repeated, having the dots reset every time you die – and also an over generous ghost pill where you can keep eating ghosts who have respawned.

However, the most game breaking bug of all is the fact that when you eat all of the dots on the level, nothing happens. There is no progression onto level 2, and the game just allows you to continue moving around an empty maze with the ghosts following you. It seems there was no proper playtesting at all for the title before it was mastered.

Flaws aside – it is still fantastic to see another piece of Matthew’s game development history preserved, and perhaps someday the game could be fixed up to be fully playable. A video of the game in action and commentary can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQjFhHka6ow

If you also get the chance, please try and visit the excellent Retro Computer Museum in Leicester. They accept donations to keep this wonderful archive alive.

UPDATE: Andy Hewitt has done an amazing update and set of fixes to the game to make it fully playable. Please check out the game via Andy’s itch.io page here, which is free of charge:

https://hewco.itch.io/monster-muncher

Case closed!

With thanks to Dasse Evertsson, Ivan S for his help trying to obtain the game, Sean Connolly and Andy Spencer for helping to preserve and Tokra for the extracted .prg in the download.

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