Growing up in the late 1980s, there were few places more magical than the video game aisle in the video store. Renting games was a fairly new phenomenon back then, and it wasn’t until 1988 that we got a video chain that rented Nintendo games in my neighbourhood. I distinctly recall standing in front of the racks upon racks of games at Jumbo Video (in all likelihood there were probably about 50), clutching my bag of free popcorn and wondering how I could ever possibly choose just one. Of course, back in those days picking a game to rent was no easy task, as there was no Metacritic to tell you which games to snap up straight away and which ones to avoid like the plague. While my first choice was a fairly good one (this being “Super Mario Brothers 2”) as the years went by and the NES catalogue expanded, my track record in the game aisle became an increasingly hit-or-miss affair.
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| Disappointment in a box |
Around this time I had also developed an obsession with horror movies – in particular slasher films in the vein of “Halloween”. Without a doubt my favourites were the “Friday the 13th” series, as upon seeing a maggot-infested Jason Voorhees drag himself out of an open grave and impale an unfortunate teenager with an iron post I felt Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives to be the very zenith of filmmaking mastery. As such, you can imagine my surprise one Friday evening when I saw everyone’s favourite masked maniac virtually leaping off of a rental box, axe at the ready – sure enough, I was looking at Friday the 13th the video game. Best of all it hadn’t yet been rented (a veritable miracle for a Friday night), so I promptly snatched it off the shelf and ran to find my Dad – thrilled at the prospect of getting to do my part in sending Jason to yet another watery grave.
Roughly half an hour later we got home, and without even stopping to grab a slice of our customary Friday night pizza I tore downstairs, switched on the TV and shoved the game into my NES console. Soon enough a flash of lightning crackled (ok, fizzled) across the screen, and the ghostly image of Jason’s mask appeared, accentuated with a butcher knife sticking through the eyehole. Barely able to contain my excitement I selected “One Player” and hit “Start” – ready to chop or be chopped, slash or be slashed, behead or be beheaded…you get the idea. However, about two minutes in I noticed there was a problem.
The game sucked.
I mean really, really sucked.
Like, “worst game of all time” sucked.
While I won’t dwell upon the overall “quality” of the gameplay (walk, jump, open door - repeat) or the “thrilling” plot (which from what I recall consisted of traipsing door to door in Camp Crystal Lake like an encyclopedia salesman to throw rocks at Jason), what I will dwell upon is the fact that Friday The 13th represented my first experience with the thankless world of horrible movie-based games. Produced by toy company LJN (known for their delightful line of Boy George action figures prior to becoming a front for Acclaim to sell more NES titles of questionable quality), Friday the 13th was simply the latest of a growing number of crimes against gameplay created for the sole purpose of grasping the coattails of beloved film franchises and riding them into the ground for a quick buck.
The Karate Kid, Jaws, Beetlejuice, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and A Nightmare on Elm Street were but a few of my favourite films that received the proverbial “LJN treatment”, which typically consisted of characters with oversized heads (presumably to emphasize their likeness to their target film referents) leaping over random obstacles that had nothing to do with the films in question. Building upon the rich tradition of Warner’s ET adaptation for the Atari console, LJN’s affinity for portraying iconic characters as “two-dimensional avatars with limited expression and limited movement” (Brookey 3) did little to endear their games to fans of the films, and even less for gamers.
Viewed in light of LJN’s vast catalogue of mediocre adaptations Trevor Elkington’s “Media Convergence and Self-Defeating Adaptations” definitely struck a chord, as while my eight year-old self didn’t understand the market factors driving the production of these wretched games, I did represent their target market. Noting that games based on films must attempt to “appease two audiences: fans of the original license, who expect a certain adherence to its details, and fans of video games, who expect adherence to common notions of gameplay” (Elkington 215), one has to wonder how LJN got away with appeasing neither audience (nor anyone with a pulse and thumbs, really) for so long. While the notion of rushed games to capitalize upon existing promotional strategies for a given film makes sense, with LJN’s games this often wasn’t the case: “The Karate Kid”, “Jaws” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” were released years after the films, and were still beyond horrible and did a disservice to the source material.
Of course money is money, and it appears the game industry still hasn’t managed to make the differentiation between the good profits made by churning out quality adaptations, and bad profits produced by pumping out sub-par games that ultimately devalue the creative property of the films themselves (Elkington 215). Even with market factors considered, they don’t necessarily provide an excuse for lazy game development – something that LJN wrote the book on, essentially recycling the same basic engine for multiple games. Providing the prototype for the poor adaptation, LJN’s games offered the combination of “unchallenging gameplay, mediocre graphics, and a narrative based directly on film events” (Elkington 219) so consistently that they might as well have incorporated it into the synopsis on the back of the game’s packaging.
That said, even if they had it likely wouldn’t have spared me any grief that Friday night, as like so many other movie fans they had me at “Friday the 13th”.
Sources
Brookey, Robert Alan. Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video
Game Industries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
Trevor Elkington, “Too Many Cooks: Media Convergence and Self-Defeating
Adaptations,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (New York, Routledge
2009), 213-235.
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