Monster Munch

Atlantis Software was one of the British publishers that flooded the 1980s market with cheap cassettes. The games sold at a price a schoolchild could cover from pocket money, and their scope matched: one idea, one screen or a handful of levels, no large ambitions. Monster Munch, released in 1983, represents that output on the Commodore 64.

It is a maze arcade game in the tradition Pac-Man established in 1980. The player collects items around an enclosed labyrinth while pursued by enemies, and survival depends on knowing the layout and using corners and passages well. The British scene produced dozens of such games, because the principle was easy to grasp, a small team could program it, and players already knew it from arcades.

The Commodore 64 supplied enough colours, hardware sprites, and the SID sound chip, which frequently lifted the overall impression even of budget titles. Differences between individual clones came down to details: enemy behaviour, movement speed, and whether the game added any idea of its own to the formula.

Today Monster Munch is more interesting as evidence of that market than as a game you will spend an evening with. For a quick comparison against the arcade original it works well, and here you can launch it straight in the browser. A few rounds are enough to see how cheap British software of the period measured up against the coin-op it was chasing.