Old games, back from the dead
Alongside our staggeringly popular Tim Burton exhibition, we’ve been running a retrospective of all his feature films. Burton’s visual flair works brilliantly on screen and seems to be crying out to be adapted for the colourful world of computer games. I thought I would investigate which of his celluloid creations have been translated into byte-size form.
In my research, I found that Burton’s films stretch back for a significant portion of gaming history, creating an interesting dialogue between the two mediums. While some of the adaptations are still available to buy new and secondhand, I discovered that there is a dedicated group of internet folk keeping alive the digital legacy of older titles by putting them online to play (for free). They’re able to do this because, unlike films, games quickly lose their commercial and aesthetic currency. They drift off into a cultural netherworld, waiting to be resurrected by the curious or the nostalgic. The two main places for digging up gaming relics are sites dedicated to Abandonware and Emulators (EMUs).
What are these things you ask? You didn’t? Well, I’ll tell you anyway because that’s the sort of chap I am (you’re welcome).
Here is a man enjoying the wonders of the computer age. Now you can too!
Abandonware
Abandonware is the description given to computer software that, while not necessarily out of copyright, has lost its lustre licensing-wise and are no longer released. They are orphaned, but not unloved. You can find hundreds of these games, usually dating from the ’80s and ’90s, hosted online available for download. While their graphics may have deteriorated by todays standards, often the gameplay is still excellent, or just great for a nostalgia kick. This is quite a contested and thorny area, as web-masters of the sites hosting these titles skirt a fine line in regards to intellectual property. However, most seem to have a very responsive policy to removing games when someone expresses a genuine interest in releasing them commercially.
Here are four of the largest and most active sites:
1. Home of the Underdogs (1 and 2)
2. Abandonia
3. Free Oldies
4. Macintosh Garden (Mac games)
I give you...The Console-idator!
Emulators
Emus are ferocious creatures that can be taller than basketball players and should be approached with caution. EMUs on the other hand, are far more docile. Short for ‘emulator’, an EMU is any software that mimics a computer or console’s hardware architecture. It pretends to be an old computer on your new computer! This allows you to access all the software for out-moded hunks o’ junk on your PC or Mac. You can get emulators for pretty much anything: Gameboy, Super Nintendo, Sega Master system, Commodore 64 and (my personal favourite from childhood) the ZX spectrum.
This is an extremely tech-geek area, and the people behind this preservation movement are doing it for the love and kudos rather than any monetary payoff (because there isn’t one). However it’s also more of a mine field than Abandonware in terms of intellectual property issues. While EMUs do exist for modern systems, we wouldn’t recommend downloading these. Though a majority of all computer games are technically in copyright, more recent ones are still very much actively protected and infringers are pursued. You could find yourself at the wrong end of an expensive law suit. Basically, if they’re still available to buy, you should buy them.
We’re erring on the side of caution and not providing direct links to emulator sites, but just take our word for it, they’re out there (but don’t tell anyone we told you).
A Byte of Burton.
Without further ado, let’s have a look at some game adaptations of the Burton movies and see how they stack up. We should note that Burton isn’t on record as having anything to do with these games, apart from providing the initial inspiration. So don’t let their badness infect his goodness.
Three Colours Beetlejuice
First up, we have Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice). Remarkably, there are three completely different versions of this game: one for the Nintendo Entertainment System (AKA the NES; a very distant relative to the Wii), one for the Gameboy (Nintendo DS’s monochromatic daddy) and the PC (like a Mac, but doesn’t work properly).
I got my hands on the PC version here at ACMI (you can find it here). It’s called Beetlejuice: Skeletons in the Closet and I have to say, it’s not too much fun. If you can get past the grating soundtrack, you’re stuck in a world of chunky gameplay pain. Every level is the same! A saving grace are the visuals which are garish, psychedelic and Escher-esque. Seeing which colour palette will come up next does provide a small amount of motivation to keep playing, however the operative word being small.
Judging by the Youtube review below, the NES version doesn’t doesn’t fare much better. To quoth the raven, “This game is utter, utter trash. The controls suck, the power ups are useless and it has nothing, NOTHING to do with the movie”. I love it when nerds get angry (Warning: he expresses his frustration in rather colourful language).
The Gameboy version looks like the slickest and most playable of the three. Whether it’s fun or not is another matter. It seems to involve spending most of your time fending off kitchen crockery and fighting what appears to be a giant PEZ dispenser. Like the NES version, and 50% of games from this era, it’s in the dreadfully tedious ‘platformer’ format. It maintains consistency with the other 2 titles by also featuring an awful soundtrack. If you’ve got nothing better to do, you can watch someone complete the whole game on Youtube.
I think sound is the real loser in all of these releases. I mean, listen to how fantastic the Beetlejuice theme could have been in 8-bit if they’d made a bit more effort. That makes me want to eat some power pills and go chasing ghosts through a maze for the rest of my life.
The ear-bleeding audio, plus the shoddy gameplay, highlights a major problem with film-to-game adaptations: developers blow the budget acquiring the licence, leaving nothing for the game. People buy the game because they love the movie, and this built-in audience makes the developers lazy (and stingy). While the trend for the half-baked has disappeared, it has slightly diminished in the big budget, labour intensive, modern era of game development. I’m expecting the quality to increase as we ‘move forward’ through Burton’s releases; maybe looking a bit like the pleasant version of this graph:
Exponential
Thanks for reading this far. In the next post I will have a look at the Batman films, Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and whatever else I can dig up. In the meantime the exhibition and film program run until Sunday 10 October.
Ronan MacEwan, ACMI Web Content Officer and recovering nerd.
