Big news coming from an exclusive with IGN this morning-not one, but TWO games based on John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN are currently being developed by Boss Games (Evil Dead: The Game). One of those which is still in early development is being created in Unreal Engine 5 with oversight from the master of horror himself, John Carpenter. Both games are being released in association with Compass International Pictures and Further Front.
According to the announcement, both games will allow players to “relive moments from the film and play as classic characters from one of the most iconic and important horror films of all time.”
Boss Team Games CEO Steve Harris added, “Everyone at Boss Team Games are huge fans of horror, and Halloween obviously holds a special place in the hearts of all horror fans. Getting to work with iconic characters like Michael Myers and build on John Carpenter’s original vision is literally a dream come true. Everyone at Boss Team is thrilled and honored to be working with Malek Akkad and John Carpenter to deliver a one-of-a-kind experience that fans of the movie and video games will love.”
John Carpenter adds, “As a huge gamer myself, I’m thrilled to help bring Michael Myers to life again in this game, and my hope is to scare you silly,” said Carpenter, who is “intimately involved” with the project.”
Over the last few years, popular horror films and franchises have been getting the video game treatment with enthusiasm from fans, but it’s certainly not a new thing; and this isn’t Myers’ first rodeo with being thrown into the gaming world.
Back in 1983, Myers would become immortalized in his very first video game released by the Atari 2600 titled simply, HALLOWEEN. However, Myers never passed the 8-bit stage until the PC fan-regulated game TERRORDROME hit the web, and then Myers making his way into DEAD BY DAYLIGHT. So while the likes of Jason, Leatherface, and even the Killer Klowns from Outer Space have gotten their own games in the last few years, it’s been long overdue for Myers to rise out of 8bit hell to finally get his updated gamer dues.
Hopefully, however, they’ll give a nod to the original 1983 Wizard game and if decapitated by Myers, you’ll be falling around the screen like a headless chicken. Because that was hilarious.
No release dates have been announced as of yet, so stay tuned as more details emerge!
Back in the early 90s, the console wars heated up pretty intensely between Nintendo and Sega. Hell, we had gangs in our schoolyard dedicated to either system willing to fight each other over which was the superior gaming console. NES fans loyal to the Mushroom Kingdom believed it to be the OG and automatically better in every way while Sega Heads stood proud of being the more “mature” way of gaming mocking the kiddie games of NES. So which was better? I mean, there are certainly a lot of variables to consider, however, I’m not here to debate an age-old argument. But, I will point out that ONE of those systems converted some kids to switch sides all with one game that BOTH systems had in their arsenal, but with one small, but highly significant difference that both changed the quality of the game itself and hell made it that much more enjoyable.
That is, of course, ABACABB.
In honor of 30 years of Mortal Monday this year-the day the arcade game dropped to home game consoles– it’s pretty important we commemorate what we schoolkids gossipped about outside of the classroom about a game where we’d seen a character fighter rip their face off and breathe fire onto their opponent, reducing the other guy to ashes and bones. And there was BLOOD. Enough of it to make Sam Raimi envious. It was almost like the forbidden fruit for those of us with uptight parents and on September 13th, 1993, we got to take this now legendary beast of a game home on multiple different platforms, depending on which one you owned of course.
I mean, this was a pretty killer promo and to be honest, it’s pretty much the only thing we gaming enthusiasts talked about for months leading up to MORTAL MONDAY.
Alas, however, when you brought that long-awaited sucker home, you were in for an enraging awaking upon the first few minutes of play. So much so that anyone standing in your way wasn’t getting any friendships in terms of conversation when it came to talking about the game. The blood had been replaced by squirts of grey goo crap that looked like 4-day-old oatmeal. And even worse, NO FATALITIES. Thanks to pearl-clutching parents and congressmen shitbags, MK had been stripped of what made it unique among its peers to appease the elder whiners for the home video release.
Nintendo, the family-friendly console, had a pretty friendly reputation with politicians at the time who blasted games such as MK in particular for the violence and sanitized the game down to a barely PG rating. But Sega being the rebellious teenager it was, inserted its own middle finger to those opposing us of our right to play a game filled with blood and gore.
Sega engineer, Paul Carruthers who was on hand for the game’s final processing and debugging was the man behind the infamous code as he himself received permission to sneak blood and gore into the game from the higher-ups’. At the main menu, players could press down, up, left, left, A, right, and down, spelling out DULLARD, to reveal a cheat menu. In the secret screen, they could do things like enable blood, which also reinstated the original arcade fatalities, and choose which arena to fight in. According to lore, Acclaim worried that DULLARD would be too hard for players to remember. So ABACABB was born from Carruthers in retrospect to a pretty sweet Genesis album and Sega players could restore MK to all its violent glory.
The code was meant to be secret, but I don’t even think SEGA cared all too much as it hinted that there was one right in the game. SEGA stood for chaos friends. Fuck your censorship.
Mere weeks after Mortal Monday, Congress and Senator Joe Lieberman rallied to get parental guidance and ratings for video games mostly solely based on Mortal Kombat alone, and now with this added not-so-secret blood code from SEGA in the mix, it was only a matter of time before we got what we now know as these rating systems that we see on games purchased today; 30 years after MK dropped into our homes forever changing the history of at-home gaming.
At the end of the day and because of this cheat blood code, SEGA sold as much as five times more MORTAL KOMBAT games than Nintendo, which hit the Mario Party goers hard in the 16-bit console wars. However, NES learned their lesson when it was time to drop MK II and fully restored all the blood and guts into the game with no code needed.
Which was great because I want my characters to bleed…like…a lot.
As a byproduct of the early 80s, one of my earliest home gaming memories was the Atari 2600. This beast of a console was the first system a wee Patti owned and was shared, albeit reluctantly, between my little brother and I. I can’t tell you how many times I would get the urge to play Kaboom or Haunted House, and find my 8-bit hogging 4-year-old sibling snotting all over the joystick playingFrogger.
The struggles of a one-console household is very real boils and ghouls.
Presently, the original Atari 2600 is pretty much a dinosaur (and looks like one too) compared to the sleek Playstation 5. However, Brontasauraus console boasted some graphics that looked like sorcery in our eyes at the time. Regardless of the now outdated sights and sounds of the Atari, the gaming system launched the beginning of household video games over 40 years ago, and hell, we need to respect that. Not to mention, hosted some pretty off-the-wall cartridges that embodied the glorious horror genre within them. Four decades later, and I still haven’t seen one damn Texas Chainsaw Massacre OR Halloween video game! Unless of course, you look towards the Atari 2600.
That being said, kudos to the breakthrough video game system that honored the horror genre in 8-bit fashion. So let’s look back at some of the coolest horror-themed video games the breakthrough gamer device had in its library, shall we?!
Halloween
First released by Wizard Video in 1983, The Shape was forever immortalized 2600 style with his very own Atari game. You actually don’t play as Michael Myers, but the “babysitter”, whom I can only guess is supposed to be Laurie Strode.
The object of the game is to save the children you’re supposed to be caring for from the Boogeyman. Who, by the way, is running through the house waving a knife all to an Atari-sized version of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. FANTASTIC. You’re given three lives which are represented by jack-o-lanterns on top of the screen, of which will disappear one by one when you are caught and killed. The highlight of this game, and I’ve been known to purposely do this just for fun, is when you’re caught by Myers. Why? Because he decapitates you (as shown in the video below). Yes, ladies and gentlemen,this appears to be the very first video game decapitation in history. You only get a tiny bit of blood spurts from said kill, but nevertheless is extremely amusing.
Another horror treasure from Wizard Video brings the Tobe Hooper classic to the Atari world in 1982. Unlike the Halloween game, gamer roles are reversed and you actually get to play as Leatherface; with a chainsaw attached to his dick.
You basically just run across a field of cow skulls and wheelchairs trying to get to your next victim. It’s heavily rumored throughout the gamer community that the high-pitched tones you hear when a victim appears is actually supposed to be a girl’s scream. The chainsaw in the game is run on fuel, and when you press the appropriate button to run it, your fuel starts to deplete. When you run out of fuel, you lose a life. So, just an educated guess here, the point is to kill off as many people as you can before running out of gas.
It’s a fun way to murder ten minutes of your life. But one thing that really irked me about this game other than the inability for game developers to give Leatherface’s body a different color than the chainsaw, is the fact your character gets “stuck” quite easily. The obstacles I mentioned above, as it turns out, you better steer clear of them. If even one pixel of Leatherface breathes too close to these in-game hazards, you’re stuck for a good couple of seconds. It’s a total pain in the ass.
Developed by Fox Interactive Games in 1982, Atari Alien has no shame in hiding that it is, in short, a basic rip-off of Pac-Man. However, instead of dodging ghosts through a maze, you’re running from Xenomorphs, which is just way cooler anyway.
The in-game maze is supposed to be designed to look like the inside of a spaceship, and said ship is infested with adult aliens laying these eggs all over the place. Just like Pac-Man, the pellets littering the screen are eggs and can be destroyed by simply running over them. There really isn’t too much else to explain, as it really is just Pac-Man with aliens. Though if you enjoy the classic arcade game, as a horror fan you’ll likely get a kick out of something different from that floating yellow head.
Published by Data Age for Atari in 1983, Frankenstein’s Monster, for me TBH, is one of the more entertaining games to come out of the 2600 era of gaming.
The basic object of gameplay is to build a wall surrounding the monster before he comes to life. To do this, you have to climb up and down the screen grabbing bricks one by hellish one. Along the way, you’ll encounter a giant tarantula, bats, ghosts, and a lovely pool of acid. You know, normal creepy castle shit. If you build the wall before the timer runs out, you save the village below from a monster rampage. If you don’t make it in time, Frankie comes to life and destroys every damn thing in its path, which is kind of my favorite part anyway. If you get a chance to play, let yourself lose at least once.
Birthed by Activision in 1985, Ghostbusters for Atari 2600 comes one year after the theatrical release, and is fuckin’ fun as hell.
You immediately begin by trapping ghosts in front of buildings, which in most cases, takes the form of Slimer. All the while, a synthetic Atari version of the Ghostbusters theme plays in the background. The graphics when ghostbusting aren’t half bad considering the console, and the driving sequences with the Ecto-1 are not as stretched out as other versions.The greatest part, however, is when you finally get to the end and fight Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s goddamn hilarious because he just kind of jumps around in front of a building like a little kid.
