Cosmic Cruncher

A maze full of dots, a hungry mouth, and enemies chasing you through the corridors - you know this formula, but Cosmic Cruncher gave it a cosmic coat and its own face. On the Commodore VIC-20 it represented one of the home variations on the immortal genre of maze munchers.

Cosmic Cruncher was released as a cartridge title from Commodore for the VIC-20 computer and was among the games with which the manufacturer filled the library of its cheap home machine. Genre-wise it follows the tradition of maze arcades, in which the player controls a character moving through corridors, collecting points, and avoiding pursuers. Cosmic Cruncher set this proven principle in a space environment with its own galactic theme.

The core of the gameplay stems from the maze genre: movement in the confined space of a maze, gradually clearing the corridors, and constantly weighing escape routes from enemies. This formula was immensely popular at the start of the 1980s and suited hardware with limited capabilities well, because it relied more on cleverness of design than on graphical performance.

The VIC-20 was sold as an accessible home computer for a broad audience and its catalog leaned on simple, instantly playable titles. Cosmic Cruncher fit precisely into this philosophy - it was a game that everyone understood within a few seconds and with which they could spend long evenings.

Today Cosmic Cruncher is above all a memory of the early era of home computers and of how the manufacturers of the day reshaped popular arcade genres into a form suitable for the modest hardware of the first 8-bits.

Why play: For classic maze munching in a cosmic garb that you'll grasp instantly and won't easily put down.