Memories Dreams Reflections 6: Video Games (1980's edition)

Initially my family owned two gaming platforms: a Commodore 64 computer and an Intellivision console (it wouldn’t be until around 1986 or 1987 that we got a Nintendo Entertainment System). I really loved a lot of the games that one could play on those old systems. One of my very favorite Intellivision games was Dracula, which was released by Imagic in 1982. Essentially a horror side-scrolling video game programmed by Alan Smith (with graphics assistance from Wilfredo Aguilar and sound design by Dave Durran), the setting is a modern city (presumably London), and you play as a vampire (somewhat unoriginally named Dracula). At the start of each night, you see Dracula rise from his coffin in the graveyard, turn into a vampire bat, and fly to the city street, where he turns into his human form and begins his search for victims.

The goal of each stage (or “night”) is to drain the blood of a certain amount of victims, then return to the graveyard before sunrise. There are two types of victims: those that are just wandering around the street and those who hide in their houses (you know a house has a victim if you can see a pair of eyes in the window above the door). Killing the victims wandering the streets is pretty easy: it’s just a matter of maneuvering Dracula so that you bite the back of the victim’s neck (this causes the victim to vanish, which earns you 50 points). To get to the victims hiding indoors, you need to go up to the door of their house and knock on it. If you killed a victim in sight of their window, they won’t come out: otherwise they’ll race out of their house quickly, temporarily stunning you and forcing you to chase after them. At the bottom of the screen are a number of icons representing your score, the number of remaining victims left to drain, the current time of night, and Dracula’s blood level. Once the goal of victims has been reached, you move Dracula back to the graveyard, where he turns into a bat, flies back into his coffin, and goes to sleep.

Of course, there are certain adversaries to avoid. One such adversary is the white wolf, who appears once you’ve hit your goal of victims. The wolf can’t kill Dracula, but if he bites you, it slows you down. To avoid it, you can turn into a vampire bat and fly away, but this also makes you vulnerable to another enemy, the purple vulture. The vulture only appears when you’re in vampire bat form. If it grabs you, it tries to carry you off the screen, and you must quickly turn back into human form. Finally, there’s the constable, who only appears in certain stages. He’s a cop who will chase after you, hurling wooden stakes at you. If one of these stakes hits you, it temporarily freezes you in place, costing you precious time. Dracula himself can’t kill the constable: if you bite him, it only temporarily paralyzes him. What you can do instead is turn victims into zombies. When you turn a victim into a zombie, the zombie is controlled by the second controller (which is why it helps to play this game with two people), and you have ten seconds to touch the constable with the zombie: doing so will make the constable vanish, earning you 75 points (and once the 10 seconds are up the zombie vanishes as well, gaining you another 50 points).

In Dracula you only have one life: lose it and its game over. There are three ways to lose the game. The first is to not get back to your coffin before sunrise (each stage begins at 12:00 AM and you have until 6 AM to finish up your tasks: you know you’re almost out of time when the sky turns pink at 5 AM). The second way to lose is if the vulture snatches you in the vampire bat form and succeeds in carrying you off the screen. The third way to lose is if Dracula runs out of blood. As you play each stage, your movements gradually lower your blood supply: flying around in the vampire bat form causes you to lose blood more quickly, so there’s a trade-off there. When Dracula’s blood is very low, he turns completely white. To replenish your blood supply, you need simply to bite more victims.

As one can probably infer from the above description, Dracula can be a somewhat repetitious game, but still a stylish and fun one. The graphics, for their time, are very good (it’s cool how the sky changes color over the course of the night), and there are some neat effects, like flashes of lightning followed by thunder. Dracula himself looks impressive, and the minimal electronic music is suitably funereal. And it's one of the first video games I ever encountered that let you play as the bad guy! 

There were other Intellivision games I enjoyed playing, like Burger Time and Shark Attack (you can probably guess why I liked playing Shark Attack). And there were just as many games I adored for the Commodore 64. To name just a few: Below the Root and Alice in Wonderland, the two games that Dale Disharoon created for Windham Classics in 1984 and 1985 (if you ever want to see a thing of beauty, do a Google Image Search for “Below the Root Map”). Archon: The Light and the Dark (1983) was always great fun, especially with two players; I would often play with my dad, and in our games I almost always played as the dark side… I just found their pieces cooler, a monstrous menagerie of dragons, manticores, basilisks, banshees, shapeshifters, and other exotic beasts. Maybe I'll say more about some of these games (especially the Windham Classics ones) at some later date, but because it's October, right now I'd rather focus on the monster games. 

Speaking of which:  one of my favorite games to play as a child was The Movie Monster Game, a single-player game released by Epyx for the Commodore 64 in 1986. Designed by Jon Leupp, the game’s main appeal to me was that (like Dracula) you got to play as the monster; when I saw the game in a computer store in 1986, with its box art featuring Godzilla breathing fire and clutching the remains of the Eiffel Tower in his left claws, I just knew that this was a game I had to own, and I convinced my dad to buy it for me. The game’s gimmick was that you were put in charge of designing your very own monster movie: first coming up with the basic scenario, then actually getting to play it. After the game’s title screen loaded up, you were shown the marquee of a movie theater, with three boxes above it: the first box is labeled STARRING, the second is labeled LOCATION, and the third is labeled ACTION. This screen is where you choose the details of your monster movie. First, in the STARRING box, you select which monster you want to play as. There were six options here: Godzilla (the only actual movie monster the game was able to get a license for), Sphectra (a giant wasp), the Glog (a huge green glob with eyes and a mouth, obviously inspired by The Blob), Tarantus (an enormous tarantula), Mr. Meringue (a rip-off of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters), and Mechatron (a gigantic robot). Next, you had to select your location, which would be the setting for the “film,” and these settings were New York City, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Moscow, and Paris. Finally, you needed to select the ACTION for the “film,” which served as the plot in a manner of speaking. The five actions to choose from were “Lunch” (which involved eating as many humans and vehicles as you could until your hunger meter was full), “Destroy Landmark” (which involved destroying a certain landmark in whatever city it was that you chose), “Search” (perhaps the most difficult action, in that it involved trying to find your monster’s captive offspring: I only ever beat this scenario once, using Sphectra), “Escape” (the easiest action, it simply involved you getting your monster out of the city), and (my favorite) “Berserk” (which involved causing as much mayhem and destruction as you could until a certain point goal had been reached, after which you needed to escape from the city with your life).

After setting up the film to your personal specifications, you next see a scene that depicts a movie theater, with an audience staring at a movie screen that is obscured from view by curtains. The curtains slowly rise to reveal the screen, and then the previews begin. Like any decent movie theater, they advertise the snacks you can buy (if this game would be made today, there’d probably be an additional screen telling people to turn off their cell phones); along with the generic popcorn they also hawk “Gummi Glogs”, which is a nice touch of humor. This ad is followed by a green preview screen that lets you know what the following movie is rated. Only in this case, the “G” rating is for “Gamers of all Ages”. What comes next is simply brilliant. The game gives you previews of some of the then current games that Epyx had released: Summer Games 1 & 2, Super Cycle, Winter Games, World Karate Championship, and World Games. An apt presentation of movie previews and at the same time a sly example of in-game advertising, very postmodern and metafictional, that. Finally, it’s time for the “Feature Presentation”. What follows is 3-4 screens of text that set the game up. The text varies depending on what type of game you selected to play, what monster and city you chose, and so on. The text is quite well-written for an 80’s game and really sets the mood for what’s to come.

Following this introduction, the actual gameplay segment kicks in. On the game screen you basically see your chosen monster standing in the center of the city you selected. The status bar that takes up the bottom portion of the screen tells you four things: the currently selected action for your monster, its endurance level (essentially its life bar), how much time has elapsed since you started playing, and your score, which goes up with each act of destruction and mayhem you commit. Most games are over by the five minute mark: I’ve never seen one go up to ten minutes or more. One of the only flaws of the game, actually… it’s fun to destroy the cities but like most fun things it’s over all too quickly. Each monster has a set of three actions, with the exceptions of the Glog and Sphectra. They can all scream (the purpose of which is used to find the monster’s child if you’re playing “Search”), all can send atomic energy blasts upwards to destroy overhead planes or helicopters, and each one has a third “special” attack unique to their character. Generally, you destroy buildings by bashing your monster against them over and over again until they topple (with Godzilla, it usually takes about 3 bumps to knock a building down). The only problem with this is your monster takes damage in the process. As if that wasn’t enough, eventually the army will start attacking you with little green civilians (army men), tanks, jeeps, jet planes, helicopters, and navy boats. Most of their vehicles are much quicker than you and can rapidly drain your life (most of the monsters, like Godzilla, are very slow). There are ways to replenish a bit of your life though, namely by eating civilians. Not all the cars and citizens you encounter can hurt you. Most vehicles, like taxis, cars and ambulances, are harmless, as are the regular citizens (who are represented as tiny white dots). The regular citizens run away from you, but if you eat them (by walking over them) you’ll gain back a bit of life. They seem pretty scarce sometimes, though.

So that’s basically the game: move your monster around, smash things, cause chaos. Sadly, though, all good things must come to an end. If you’re good enough, after causing enough carnage you can escape the city, but more often than not your endurance bar runs out and its game over. No matter if you win or lose, at the end of the game you return back to the end of the film in the movie theater, where you receive a summation of your monster’s actions and an evaluation of how much damage you did (if you score over 1000 points a national emergency is declared). Then you are given a final score, and this is followed by the end credits, which is a list of all the people who helped make the game. Then you’re booted back to the lobby, and you can start a new game. One thing that gives the game a lot of replay value is that, with its six monsters, six cities and 5 scenarios, you essentially get 180 different permutations. And each monster has its own strengths and weaknesses and different styles of play. For instant, Godzilla can breathe radioactive fire and is the strongest monster, but he’s also the slowest. Sphectra has a sonic weapon and, being the only monster capable of flight, is also the fastest, but he’s also the weakest and drowns in water. The Glog has top endurance and a corrosive touch, but only average strength. Tarantus can shoot webs and is the second fastest monster, but like the Glog his strength is only average. Mr. Meringue can spit out globs of meringue and is fairly strong (he also recovers his health pretty quickly), but he’s also slow and floats uncontrollably in water. Finally, Mechatron is very powerful and has a laser weapon attack, but his endurance meter is incapable of recovering and he can’t touch the water. As a kid, I tended to gravitate towards playing as Godzilla, though Mr. Meringue was a favorite as well, as he reminded me so much of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And there’s no debating that Tarantus is one of the coolest-looking monsters in the game, a big black and brown spider of death. I even had fun reading the instruction booklet that came with the game, as it featured black and white illustrations and detailed profiles of the six monsters, and towards the back of the booklet were summaries of various monster movies, which at the time I found to be fascinating reading.

More info on The Movie Monster Game here: 

https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/The_Movie_Monster_Game