Munchy Worm (C64)

A free and fun snake-like game. This is a Commodore 64 version of the original Munchy Worm game by Antibody Software.

Munchy Worm was featured on the cover disk of ZZap64's Jun/Jul 2026 issue #32!

Eat mushrooms for points and to grow longer. The longer your worm is the more you score. Avoid the walls and your own tail. Eat mushrooms rapidly to increase the score multiplier. Eat stars to shrink your worm. Each new star will take longer to spawn than the previous so make use of them sparingly.

HIGH SCORE TIPS
Avoid eating the star for as long as possible as a longer worm means higher points. Get the score multiplier up as high as possible early on while the worm is still moving relatively slowly.

KEYBOARD
Use WASD or IJKL to move the worm. Inputs are buffered so you can make quick turns by rapidly pressing the appropriate direction keys without waiting for the worm to move first.

JOYSTICK
Version 1.01 adds Joystick support (in port 2). Joystick movements are buffered similarly to the keyboard controls, so you can make multiple quick joystick movements and the worm will follow them all one by one. To make tight turns, pull the joystick diagonally in the opposite direction to the worm and it will do a 180 turn towards the diagonal. For example if the worm is moving up and you want to do a quick right and down, then press the joystick diagonally down and right. To make this less prone to input error, you can first press and hold down and then quickly slide the joystick to the down-right diagonal - this will have the same effect as moving right and down quickly.

IF USING AN EMULATOR
If you're using an emulator please don't use the arrow keys to move - use WASD, IJKL  or whichever keys are emulating the joystick (normally the numpad on VICE). Emulators don't translate arrow keys to C64 cursor keys perfectly at high speed which can cause the worm to move in the wrong direction if you press the keys too rapidly.

TECHNICAL
This game uses some raster tricks combined with clever use of sprites and user defined characters to produce smooth pixel-fine worm movement, and to squeeze extra colors into each cell without having to use blocky multicolor graphic modes.

MUSIC
Thanks to Richard Bayliss for very kindly writing an original piece of music for the game, and for providing the technical info required to implement it.

LATEST UPDATE
Version 1.05 tweaks the sound effects to make them louder. The addition of music in 1.04 made the sound effects sound a bit soft in comparison, so they've been adjusted.