It was morning in America again. The ‘80s and early ’90s, Reagan and Bush, cut-off shorts,video stores, bicycles, horror movies galore, and Nintendo. Our parents had to be reminded by the television;it’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?We were on Elm Street, watchingFreddy Krueger slam dunk a girl’s face into a televisionscreen. And any Friday night, you could pick up a pizza and rent some games, and thanks to the deus ex machina, theNintendo Entertainment System, you could experience defeat at the hands or teeth of Jason Voorhees or Bruce (the great white inJaws) again and again, because you certainly were not going to win – ever.
Horrorandsci-fiwere in a second Golden Age in the era of the VHS rental, and it bled over into 8-bit games in a time when video games were thought to be for kids and long before the industry figured out horror games could be frightening in ways other than just savaging the player with no mercy. The NES was king of the world of games, and it was stocked with horror and sci-fi titles, both original and based on movies. Of those based on horror and sci-fi movies, we have catalogued 25 below. Some of these are based on family-friendly movies, and some were real horror franchises with a capital R.
25Jaws (1975)
Jawsisone of the scariest movies evermade. It programmed a (renewed) fear of the deep water into America and the world. The movie, directed bySteven Spielberg, is adapted from the novel by Peter Benchley. The small tourist destination of Amity Island suffers several shark attacks from a great white that has taken to preying on people. The police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), and oceanographer, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), go out on the ocean with the fisherman, Quint (Robert Shaw), to hunt for the shark and kill it. Three sequels were made, but none recaptured the suspense of the original.
Jawswas released on the NES in November of 1987. This was the first horror movie to land on the NES, and its success is to blame for the trend of horror movies and Nintendo’s 8-bit system.Jawsracked up the highest body count of any NES horror monster because it was confounding to play and nigh impossible for most children to beat. Most ‘80s kids hardly made it past the first screen.
InJaws, you drive a little boat around a map, select a location, and dive into the water, in single-screen levels, to take your chances at encountering Bruce or just getting killed by his smaller cousins. You just get eaten over and over, and your parents hear you scream in horror every 10 minutes from the other end of the house. This was one of those games that you rented knowing you were doomed to fail. This formula of impossibly hard game design and lack of explanation would carry over into other horror games.
Rent on AppleTV
24Star Wars (1977)
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
George Lucas’ sci-fi epic revolutionized special effects and gave birth to the modern blockbuster. Of all of the franchises on this list, there is none bigger thanStar Wars, which has an empire of merchandising, sequels, prequels, and spin-off shows. Set in another galaxy in a past age, an evil empire has replaced the galactic republic and built a world-destroying super weapon, called the Death Star. Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) of Alderaan is captured by the imperials and Darth Vader, and taken aboard the Death Star, which is used to destroy her home world. Meanwhile, she has hidden the plans to destroy the battle station in a droid, R2-D2, who has escaped with another droid, C-3PO, where they come into the possession of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). R2-D2 wanders off in search of the Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Luke and C-3PO track him down. When the imperials track the droids to the home of his uncle and his wife and kill them, Luke joins Ob-Wan on his quest to help the princess.
A Metroid-Style Side-Scroller
There were twoStar Warsgames on the NES based onA New Hope. The first was released in December of 1987 and took the player to various planets withMetroid-like stages. Between side-scrolling stages, there are first-person space levels in which you shoot tie fighters with the Millennium Falcon’s guns.
The second game based onA New Hope, like the 1987 game, was only titled,Star Wars, but this re-do is much more advanced and true to the settings of the movie. The first half is set entirely on Tatooine. The second half is mostly set on the Death Star. After you escape the Death Star in the Falcon, you have a couple of first-person space levels, and then it changes to a top-down stage for the Death Star trench run.
Stream on Disney+
Related:10 Ghosts from The Real Ghostbusters Cartoon We’d Love to See in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
23Ghostbusters (1984)
Ghostbusters
Ghostbustersis a horror comedy, set in the New York in the early ‘80s, in a world, similar to the horror movies it is spoofing, where ghosts are real. Three college professors, Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) are booted from their jobs and go into business to capture ghosts. They hire a secretary, Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts), and a fourth Ghostbuster, Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), who is a blue-collar worker, and the Ghostbusters become successful entrepreneurs. Their first customer, Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), becomes possessed by a demon in the final act and opens an interdimensional gate with her neighbor (Rick Moranis) on the roof of their apartment building, allowing the demigod, Gozer, to come to Earth in the form of a 200-foot-tall marshmallow man.
A Primitive Top-Down Shooter
TheGhostbustersfranchise saw three NES releases, each one very different from the other. The first was developed by Activision and ported to the NES in October of 1988 from the PC (originally released in 1984). It is primitive, mixing top-down driving stages and single-frame stages where you capture ghosts. The graphics are flat and reflect a different time before the NES. The final boss battle with Gozer resembles a boss fight screen from the firstThe Legend of Zelda, with stationary enemies shooting fireballs at you (an impossible number of fireballs).
Stream on Fubo
22RoboCop (1987)
RoboCopis known for itssatirical, hyper-violent portrayal of American corporatism. A corporation, OCP, takes private control of the crime-plagued Detroit’s police force and attempts to create robots to police the city. Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy, a cop who is killed on duty and resurrected as a cyborg to serve as a programmable police officer with perfect aim and no conscious. Through the course of the film, RoboCop recovers his memories of his wife and son, and he uncovers connections between the corporation that made him, OCP, and the men who killed Murphy.RoboCopreceived two sequels and a cartoon show, and in 2014, a remake was released but was rejected by fans because it changed the character designs too much and lacked the practical effects magic that made the robots feel real.
A Fun Shooter Side-Scroller
Released in November of 1988, theRoboCopgame is a side-scroller in which you shoot or punch goons that run at you or stick their head out a window to shoot at you. RoboCop picks up two other guns in addition to his pistol, which has infinite ammo, and the player is able to aim up and at diagonals, which might sound like nothing at all, but this was a different age. The graphics are fair for a NES game in 1988. Every kid who rentedRoboCophad one thought in mind, and that was fighting the ED-209, the robot-t-rex with machine guns.
Stream on Max
21Godzilla (1954)
In the original 1954Godzilla, a 164-foot tall dragon with radioactive breath, created by American nuclear tests in the Pacific, comes ashore in Japan and destroys Tokyo. For the next twenty years, Toho released a flood of sequels with other monsters before sending the radioactive dragon on vacation for a decade. He then returned triumphantly with a direct sequel to the original movie,Godzilla 1985, relaunching the franchise for another near-20-year stretch before again becoming oversaturated and put back on ice for a second decade-long break. Godzilla returned again in 2014’s American remake, while Toho produced the strangest version of Godzilla ever,Shin Godzilla, which never saw a sequel. Toho instead turned toward crafting a remake, and has seen their greatest success to date with the release ofGodzilla Minus One.
About the Game
The firstGodzillagame on NES,Godzilla: Monster of Monsters, was released December 1988. The player moved Godzilla and Mothra across a grid map of stages, with the stages set in space and playing like a side-scroller shooter. The player would battle other giant monsters in a single-screen fight with a black screen. The game was clunky and difficult, but there was only one deciding factor when it came to renting it – you saw that you play as Godzilla on the back of the box, and that was the beginning and end of all debate as to what game you wanted to rent for the night. It was, unfortunately, a grinder of a shooter, with the player fighting a bunch of guns on the ground instead of monsters in the actual stages.
The second game,Godzilla 2: War of Monsterswas released February 1992, and it was a turn-based strategy game with RPG-style battle screens. Any kid that mistakenly rented this was in for the greatest disappointment on the whole list. The game plays out entirely on maps, like a board game, with the player moving around tanks and planes to attempt to intercept the monsters. When you intercept a monster, you jump to an RPG battle with stationary sprites. The misery of discovering this was what you wasted your rental on left a life-long scar that educated a generation of ‘90s kids about investing your money wisely.
Related:Friday the 13th: Why Jason Voorhees May Actually Not Be the Killer in the Slasher Horror Franchise
20Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13threleased in the summer of 1980,combining elements of Italian giallo slasherswith American morality folk horror (the man with the hook and the parked couple) and the summer camp experience of North East coasters who lived in the region of the Adirondacks. The first film is a who-dun-it, with multiple kills being shot in the first-person perspective to obscure the identity of the killer. In the end, we learn that the mother of a drowned boy, Pamela Voorhees, is the killer. Pamela is decapitated at the end of the movie, but the franchise would live on, with Jason Voorhees returning to avenge his mother’s death.Friday the 13this the horror franchise of the ‘80s. It was there at the beginning and the end, with eight entries in the original timeline, before Paramount sold the rights to Jason to New Line, who madeJason Goes to Hell, and the franchise went to hell with him.
The NES game released in February of 1989, just four months before Paramount’s lastFriday the 13thentry,Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan. What should have been a great promotional tool to build the reach of the franchise forPart 9, became a funerary tribute to Jason, whose original timeline ended that year. FollowingJaws’ themes of vague objectives and a villain that comes back over and over,Friday the 13thachieves its frights through terrorizing children with their imminent failure. You wander around the lake, trying to light the fireplaces in the cabins, picking up weapons to fight Jason, and then running into the goalie-masked killer out of nowhere in any given cabin, where you fling rocks at him in an over the shoulder,Punch-Outstyle perspective, and get clobbered by Jason as if every level ofPunch-Outwas Mike Tyson.
Friday the 13thhas seen a comeback in recent years, with fans improving the NES game through ROM-hacks, changing the enemies, color schemes, and even addingMichael MyersandFreddy Kruegerto different versions. Recently,Doomfans have made a complete first-person version of the game, using the NES sprites to create a 3D adventure which hits us right in the nostalgia button with a machete. Dear Doomers, please make a version with all the ‘80s and ‘90s slasher monsters – Freddy, Chucky, Tiffany, Candyman, the Tall Man, and Michael, and replace Doom-guy’s face with Ash’s.
19Predator (1987)
Predator (Edit)
Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, a private military contractor, who leads a team of elite former military members into the jungles of Central America on a rescue mission. They find a downed helicopter and find the soldiers' bodies have been skinned and hung up in the trees. The hostages taken by the guerrillas are executed, but Dutch and his men run into something else in the jungle on their way to the location of their pick-up. An alien, with cloaking technology, hunts them and takes their bodies, one at a time.
Predatorhas spawned novels, comic books, a toyline, five more films, and numerous games on multiple consoles over the last four decades. The first two movies in the franchise stand above the rest for their horror elements. The movies were not just man-hunt movies. There was an emphasis on the treatment of the bodies in the first movies. The alien hunter field-dressed men like animals, taking their skins, hearts, skulls, and sometimes other parts for trophies. The dehumanization and the body horror elevatedPredatorbeyond just a slasher with an alien monster, and it has been singled out as a movie that is potentially read as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic due to the nearly all-male cast and their sexually-loaded dialogue.
An Indescribable Mess
Released in April of 1989,Predatoris almost indescribable. First, there is a section in the jungle that has the player fighting commandos as well as butterflies, scorpions, and aliens that fly across the screen like enemies inMetroid. The game repeatedly switches betweenMetroid-like stages with black backgrounds and stages called “big mode,” in which you run and gun with a much larger version of the character on a stage with a purple background. This game is crazy bad. Some of the games on this list are so bad they are a riot, but this one is just bad-bad. The final boss is a flying giant predator head.
18Back to the Future (1985)
Back to the Future
Back to the Future follows teenager Marty McFly as he is inadvertently sent back to 1955, where he disrupts his parents' meeting. With the assistance of eccentric inventor Doc Brown, Marty must restore the timeline by ensuring his parents fall in love and find a way back to 1985.
Back to the Futureisthe best time travel movie ever madeand the most rewatchable, with something new to discover in the background or about the timeline every viewing. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels to 1955 in a time machine created from a DeLorean by his elderly friend, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and he gets stuck without any plutonium to return. In 1955, he runs into his mother and father, and he stops them from becoming romantically involved by accident, and Marty’s only hope to fix the timeline, ensure his birth, and return home is the younger version of Doc Brown.
In the sequel, Doc returns to 1985, scoops up Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) and takes them to 2015, where old-Biff steals the DeLorean and makes a mess of the timeline. The second film ends with a cliffhanger, with the Delorean being struck by lightning while the Doc is driving it, and stranding Marty in 1955. Doc ends up in the old West in 1885, and he hides the DeLorean for 1955 Marty to use, which he does, and he too gets stuck in 1885 with no gasoline.
Thematically Fine, but Weird Gameplay
The first game released in September of 1989. The sequels were combined into one game,Back to the Future Part II & III, and released in 1990. The first title is arcade-like, with the player running or skateboarding up vertical scrolling levels set in the streets of Hill Valley, collecting clocks and dodging obstacles. In the final level, you trade the skateboard for the DeLorean as you race to the cable at 88mph and zap back to 1985. You would think the second game would advance things a little more, but it makes the first look like an arcade masterwork. Doc drops Marty off at the beginning of the game in an alternate, ruined version of the Mushroom Kingdom. Nothing says good ol’ 2015 like spiked turtles and warp pipes. This one misses the mark worse than any game on this list.
Related:Resident Evil: Where Should a Movie Reboot Start?
17Sweet Home (1989)
Sweet Homeis a Japanese horror movie set in a haunted mansion with a five-person news crew that travels to the home and tries to clean up the frescoes on the walls, painted by the former owner, to photograph them for a story. When one of the crew members disturbs a shrine on the property, the curse/ghost is released. The house is haunted by a woman who unknowingly lit the furnace of the home when her child was playing in it. The child was killed, and the woman went mad, kidnapping children from the village and burning them to death in her furnace.
The Inspiration for Resident Evil
Sweet Homeis most famous for the parts thatResident Eviltook inspiration from – it is set in a haunted mansion, you fight zombies, and there are first-person cut-scenes when you open doors. The game, released in December of 1989, is set in the isometric perspective and is a party-based RPG with first-person battle screens. The player is tasked with photographing fresco paintings, as in the movie. This is the biggest game of all of these movie-based games. The playthrough below is over four hours long.
Stream on Internet Archiv
16Batman (1989)
Tim Burton’sBatman, played by Michael Keaton, reshaped the image of Batman and the narrative structure of superhero movies. The masks in all subsequent adaptations of the Dark Knight have followed the lead of the mask design in the original film, and most have likewise been black. Burton’sBatmandrew on darker comics of the ‘80s, creating a borderline horror movie with noir lighting and art deco set design. The setting is timeless – with modern technology and ‘40s aesthetics. Burton altered the origin of Batman, pinning the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents on Joker (Jack Nicholson).
The death of his parents weighs heavily on this Batman. He studies the face of Joker on video loop in his batcave. He is slightly awkward and distant in his attempt to have a romantic relationship with journalist, Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger). He is isolated, and there is greater emphasis in Burton’s film on the stress on Bruce that is created by his divided life. Warner Brothers felt Burton’s film was too dark, but in the decades that have followed, all of DC’s best comic book movies have been dark/serious:The Dark Knight,Watchmen,Man of Steel,Wonder Woman, andJoker.
The Best Movie Game on the List
We come to the best balance on the list. Awesome movie and awesome game. Released in December of 1989,Batmanis unquestionably the best movie game of the whole list. The music, animations, sprites, controls, and level design are all top-shelf. The only thing missing is the grappling gun. There are three weapons: a gun, a Batarang, and a discus. Batman’s defining move in the game is the wall jump, which is used extensively for its platforming puzzles. The last two levels are among the most challenging platforming stages, besidesGremlins 2(still to come), that were ever faced on the NES. Each level ends with a boss fight, and in addition to the Joker, three of the boss characters are from the comics: Killer Moth, Electrocutioner, and Firebug.
