At a glance: Radar Rat Race · VIC-20 · Commodore, 1981 · Maze chase · Score: 7.0/10
Radar Rat Race is Commodore’s maze-chase answer to a question nobody asked: what if Namco’s Rally-X, but with rodents? You are a mouse — a rat, per the title, though you play the hunted rather than the hunter — racing through a maze collecting cheese, pursued by cats, with a radar map at the bottom of the screen showing the whole maze and every creature in it. The Rally-X DNA is unmistakable: the scrolling maze larger than the screen, the pursuers with their simple hunting logic, the defensive weapon limited in supply. But Commodore’s programmers dressed the formula in the VIC-20’s own clothes — primary colours, character graphics the size of postage stamps, and a tinny, looping rendition of ‘Three Blind Mice’ that will be in your head until the heat death of the universe. It launched in the machine’s first cartridge wave and became one of its signature titles.
Radar, cheese and star traps
The radar is the game’s making, and the reason for its title. Because the maze scrolls beyond the screen, the little map at the bottom is not decoration — it is how you plan, spotting cats converging two screens away and routing your cheese run through the empty quarters. It gives Radar Rat Race a strategic flavour its maze-chase contemporaries lack: you are not merely reacting to what you can see, you are reading a battlefield. Your defence is the star trap, dropped behind you to stall a pursuing cat, and like Rally-X’s smoke screen it is rationed, so every use is a small economic decision. The cheese itself is scattered generously, and clearing a maze demands the full grand tour — which is exactly what the cats are counting on.
Judged as a VIC-20 cartridge, it is charmingly of its machine. The scrolling is smooth, the maze is readable, the cats are visibly cats at character-graphic scale, and the pace is a notch friendlier than Rally-X’s — appropriate for the family audience Commodore was courting. The ‘Three Blind Mice’ loop deserves its own paragraph in VIC history: generated by the VIC chip’s square-wave voices, it is simultaneously dreadful and perfect, the sound of 1981 home computing in eight bars. Modern players can mute it. Original players could not escape it, and many would not want to: it is the game’s identity, as much as the radar itself.
A first-wave favourite
Radar Rat Race holds up better than many launch titles because its core idea — the radar — solves the scrolling maze’s fairness problem elegantly. Deaths feel earned: the information was on screen, in miniature, and you misread it. That fairness, plus short mazes and instant restarts, gives it genuine one-more-go pull. It lacks the depth of the machine’s later maze games — Serpentine’s food-chain strategy is a generation ahead in design — but as an arcade conversion in spirit, executed with wit and a tune you cannot unhear, it earns its place in the first rank of Commodore’s own cartridges.
Collectors will find it everywhere and should: it is cheap, common and representative. Pair it with Avenger and Jupiter Lander and you have Commodore’s 1981 calling card, the three cartridges that told the world what the friendly computer was for. Then try to get ‘Three Blind Mice’ out of your head.
Of rats, radars and Rally-X
The Rally-X comparison deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissive one, because Radar Rat Race is often filed as a clone and left there. Namco’s original was a genuinely innovative arcade game — among the first with a radar map and continuous background music — and Commodore’s adaptation is best understood as a translation into the VIC’s native tongue: the race car becomes a rat because the machine’s character graphics draw a charming rat more readily than a convincing car; the smoke screen becomes a star trap because the fiction needs a rodent’s weapon; and the music becomes ‘Three Blind Mice’ because a nursery tune about rodents, played on square waves, is either a joke or a masterstroke and the jury retired decades ago still laughing. Translation, done with this much wit, is a creative act. The VIC version is not the arcade game at home. It is the arcade game as the VIC-20 would have dreamed it.
Its launch-lineup role completes the case. Alongside Avenger’s space war and Jupiter Lander’s physics, Radar Rat Race gave the first-wave catalogue its maze — and, thanks to the radar, its first taste of strategy. Families who bought the friendly computer for Christmas 1981 could and did argue about which of the three cartridges was best. That the argument is still available, word for word, to new owners in 2026 is the definition of a launch library that worked.
In the slot today
Modern players should try the game as its first audience played it: with the sound on, however strong the temptation. The ‘Three Blind Mice’ loop is not an accompaniment to Radar Rat Race; it is part of the mechanism, a metronome of mild derangement that sets the game’s tempo in your head and makes the maze feel faster than it is. Muted, the cartridge is a good maze chase. Sounded, it is an experience — the one owners imitate, unprompted, when the game is mentioned forty years later. Few soundtracks in the VIC library can be identified from three hummed notes. This one can be identified from two.
There is also a quiet design credit due: the radar screen-within-a-screen was a generous solution to a real problem, and generosity to the player — information given, fairness engineered in — is the trait that separates the early Commodore cartridges from the era’s cynical cash-ins. The rat race is rigged in your favour just enough to make losing instructive. That balance is why the game taught a generation to read a map while running for their lives, a skill with applications the designers cannot have foreseen.
Last word to the cats, who deserve it: as pursuers they are perfectly pitched — relentless in aggregate, beatable in particular, and visibly learning nothing at all, which is what makes outwitting them feel like skill rather than script. A maze chase lives or dies by its hunters, and Radar Rat Race’s hunters, read on the little radar as converging certainties, generate the game’s best moments: the cheese run abandoned mid-corridor, the star trap spent like a fortune, the dash through the closing gap. All of it legible, all of it fair, all of it still funny. The race, it turns out, was never rigged. It was merely excellent.
The radar is not decoration — it is how you plan. Radar Rat Race turns a scrolling maze into a readable battlefield.
Radar Rat Race is a witty, fair and very VIC-20 maze chase whose radar idea still feels clever. It is simpler than the machine’s best maze games, but its charm, its strategy and its infamous soundtrack make it a first-wave essential. Cheese well earned.
Verdict: read the radar, ration the stars, and hum along whether you want to or not.
Give the rat his due: a clever adaptation, a fair challenge, a tune for the ages. Radar Rat Race is the sound of Commodore learning, in public and at speed, how to make a home computer feel like an arcade that loved you back.