Sunday, October 21, 2012

"Ghostbusters", Commodore 64, 1984.

This one has gotten somewhat lost in the mists of time, but it was a great game based on a great movie. (Rick Moranis' party-hosting banter improvised? And whatever happened to awesome '80s-movie animated lightning, too labour intensive when we could just rent strobe lights?) A story I just now read on Mobygames describes how the Activision crew would go to the movies and after seeing Ghostbusters, David Crane boasted that he was going to adapt that one (using gameplay framework he was already tinkering with.) A bold move after ET proved that film-to-game conversions weren't necessarily the Midas touch! The follow-the-bouncing-ghost sing-along of Ray Parker Junior's (subconscious theft of Huey Lewis') Ghostbusters theme song was apparently implemented one week before the game shipped. Winston Zeddemore totally unrepresented in the game? Controversy or just another victim of hardware-limited colour palettes?

It's too bad Ghostbusters 2, game and movie both, were so wretched.

GHOSTBUSTERS
THE COMPUTER GAME
BY DAVID CRANE
GHOSTBUSTERS!
SAVE YOUR CITY WITH YOUR COMMODORE 64
Available on disk.

The big question I have is: given that this game was released at least for the Apple 2, Atari 8-bit, and ZX Spectrum same year the movie came out, why does this ad only advertise the Commodore 64 version when Activision could move more units overall by mentioning the others? I like how other than the platform, the only substantive thing mentioned is the name of its superstar designer, the John Romero of his day. (Heck, if you're going to quit Atari because you want name recognition -- and the increased salaries it brings -- then you swing it!) To be honest, the only selling point anyone needs is that photo of the movie's protagonists, even if their likenesses weren't part of the licensing deal.

Sometime tomorrow, following the publication of this post, this little blog is on track to receive its 2000th view! Thanks for the attention, whoever you are! I only have one known commenter and only promote updates to the blog on (the hollowed-out, let's be honest) Google+ ... but the second thousand came much sooner than the first thousand, so it just goes to show -- make a post every day for a week every few weeks and traffic builds. Who would have thought it? (I finger Google and the long tail, but that's just a hunch.) I'll pick a far more esoteric subject for my next blog project and we'll see if I can't keep it in actual, total obscurity...

7 comments:

  1. Those are actually some pretty nice graphics for 1984!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Then Rowan spends a half-hour trying to come up with the best bon mot retort researching the versificator from the novel 1984, which of course puts together novels, not images. (Of course, there are other machines which take images apart, but we're drifting here.) Maybe Brave New World has what I was looking for, but loses the 1984 connection.

      Of course, this is the version for the 8-bit multimedia powerhouse the C64 being advertised -- I'm sure the Apple II and Speccy versions looked considerably more ... brutal. (Double for the later Atari 2600 version.!) It's funny to consider how much the poor man out the IBM PC and Apple Mac were in this market... when you consider that IBM commissioned Sierra to make their hideous King's Quest 1 to demonstrate the great multimedia capabilities of the PCjr! Of course, Amiga and Atari ST enthusiasts knew about this injustice all along, enjoying Renaissance frescoes when the rest of us were still daubing cave paintings with feces. Ah, but I digress.

      This might account for why the ad only advertises the C64 -- if you only promote one version, make it the best-looking one, and customers' imaginations can fill in the blanks for the other versions' graphics.

      Delete
    2. "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not allowed: P"

      I'll be damned, Blogspot, if I can't use HTML in comment replies to my own blog. Whose interest is served?

      Delete
  2. I think I played this game more than any other on my '64. The rightmost screenshot represents the final-final thing that you get to after like an hour and a half of bustin' ghosts around the city. You have as many chances to get between the marshmallow man's legs as you have guys remaining and you can very easily just die and end the game here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In 2000 views, you are the first non-anonymous commenter. Hats off!

      There's a strategy to judicious use of endgame screenshots in advertising. If you show three screens on the box that the player sees in the first 5 minutes of gameplay, they may assume it's a flimsy slip of a game. Posting screens that they may never see keeps them motivated to grind, however. (Also it gives you value for game assets that bad players may never see, more brutal budgetary math that left several nasty NES games with hugely disappointing game completion sequences.)

      Both Loom and Monkey Island drove me bonkers with art on the box back that was not in fact present in the game.

      This was a killer game, and the endgame was only a rumour to me.

      Delete
  3. I can confirm that's the endboss, I reached him many times too. And was killed by him many times. It was hard to tell if you had done all you needed to do to reach him: he seemed to appear semi-randomly after long periods of play.

    The first screenshot on the left actually strikes me as pretty advanced for a C64 game. Actually it seems to predate titles like Grand Theft Auto 2, before Vice City, when you played in a 2D topdown environment. The Ghostbusters were free to roam the city at will ... sorta.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The leftermost shot is just a reskinned Pac-Man -- the ghosts are even still ghosts! It acts as an overworld map, and I'm wondering what the first of those were, unlocking further delights within -- Ultima 1?

    I was always floored to realise how many elements of the first couple of GTAs were already present in NES games such as Micro Machines. Just needed the right sassy attitude, which wasn't really possible in a pre-Genesis world.

    Congrats on being my second named commenter! Where are you hanging your hat these days? I gather there was recently a musical reunion of sorts...

    ReplyDelete