RHYTHM GAME × COMMODORE 64

SID Shredder

Guitar Hero on a Commodore 64, playing songs from 1993 to 2017. Loads from tape, obviously.

⏱ THIRTEEN SONGS, FOUR DIFFICULTIES · RUNS IN YOUR BROWSER · SAVES AUTOMATICALLY

ADDED: 13 OCTOBER 2026
LAST UPDATED: 13 OCTOBER 2026
MODEL: CLAUDE OPUS 5.5
REF: 2cff5f2a

Sandstorm, on a Commodore 64, seventeen years early. The machine synthesised a three-voice SID chip in your browser so that Smash Mouth could load from tape. History has been corrected.

THE ENTIRE GAME DESIGN DOCUMENT

THE PROMPT THAT STARTED IT ALL 🧠

> Guitar Hero, but it's on the C64. It has anachronistic songs.▌

That’s it. That’s the brief. Everything else — every line of code, every pixel, every note — came out of the machine. Typos preserved for authenticity.Disclosure: a human may have intervened afterwards, when the machine made the first upgrade cost more than the GDP of Wales, or decided a run should last eleven hours. Even then, the human only fixed it by typing more prompts and sighing loudly. 🫠

About the Slop

SID Shredder is a Guitar Hero-style rhythm game made to look and sound like a Commodore 64 game. It plays songs from 1993 to 2017, the C64’s last years and after, as chiptune covers on a synthesised three-voice SID chip. It starts at a BASIC prompt, and every song loads from tape, with the striped border and the screech.

Notes slide down a highway in five fret colours: press the fret as a note crosses the line, and hold it for the tails. The SID only plays the song’s lead part while you hit its notes, so a miss cuts it out. Streaks raise the multiplier, and nailing a flashing phrase charges SID Power, which doubles it and turns the border to rainbow bars.

Thirteen songs, from Corona and the Spice Girls to Gangnam Style and Shape of You, each in full and most in a short version, with four difficulties and a practice mode that slows the tempo without changing the pitch. Run out of rock and the song stops with ?OUT OF ROCK ERROR. No cassettes were harmed. Several were rewound with a pencil.

🎮 CONTROLS

A, S, D, F, G (or 1–5) for the frets
Space for SID Power
P or Esc to pause
Arrows and Enter for menus
Gamepads and guitar controllers work too

✨ GAME-CHANGING FEATURES

Guitar Hero on a synthesised Commodore 64 SID chip
Thirteen anachronistic songs, from 1993 to 2017
Tape loading, a BASIC prompt and ?OUT OF ROCK ERROR
SID Power, multipliers and a rock meter
Four difficulties, from three frets to five-fret chords
Practice mode at 50% or 75% speed, and audio calibration

How To Play

A quick guide for your first session. The machine wrote the game; we wrote this bit from its README.

Press a key at the BASIC prompt and watch it load from tape. Pick a song and a difficulty on the setlist.
Press the fret (A, S, D, F or G) as each note crosses the line, and hold it for as long as the tail.
Hit notes in a row to build the multiplier, up to x4. Miss and the lead cuts out until your next hit.
Hit every note of a flashing phrase to charge SID Power, then press Space to double the multiplier.
Keep the rock meter up. If it empties, the song stops with ?OUT OF ROCK ERROR.
Use Practice mode to slow a song down, and Calibrate in Options if the notes feel early or late.