Back Yard of the Universe

I’m referring here to the 1984 Commodore 64 game and not the fancy 2009 360/PS3 one. Back in 1989, this was the first game I got for my very first computer, apart from the mostly awful ones that came included in the bundle. Yes, I was a bit late getting a C64 but I was only eight at the time and I really didn’t care. It was a computer, I was a geek-in-training and it was fantastic.

I seem to recall that my dad brought Ghostbusters for me from the local newsagents, this being back in ye olde days when computer games came on cassette tapes and cost about £1.99. The copy I had was a budget re-release on the Mastertronic Ricochet label, complete with hideous comic-book-style logo at the bottom.

Cassette inlay for the 1984 C64 Ghostbusters, Mastertronic Ricochet re-release (image from MobyGames.com).

One of the first interesting things about the game was that, whilst loading, you could actually play a Space Invaders-style shooter called ‘Invade-A-Load’. It was pretty simplistic, and I don’t know whether or not this was just on the budget re-release of the game, but it was better than just looking at a pretty 8-bit picture, or making your eyes go funny with one of those psychedelic, multi-colour-band loading screens you used to get. Rather embarrassingly, the first time I placed the cassette in the C2N Datasette, hit shift+run/stop and pressed play on tape, I thought that the ‘Invade-A-Load’ thing was the proper game, and was therefore understandably confused when it bore no real relationship to the screenshots on the back of the inlay or the film.

Anyway, it didn’t take too long to realise my mistake and I was soon playing the game proper. Looking back at it now, Ghostbusters seems a very limited game, but still a rather unique one in a world of generally awful movie tie-ins. The game loosely followed the plot of the film, featuring the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (a collection of chunky white pixels), the Keymaster (a collection of chunky yellow pixels in the shape of a key), the Gatekeeper (a collection of chunky black pixels in the shape of a lock) and Zuul (a collection of chunky white pixels that, erm, spelt out the word ‘Zuul’), but that was pretty much where the similarities ended. The main gameplay consisted of you moving around a one-screen, top-down map of New York waiting for buildings to flash red which, as we all know, is the standard sign that they have become possessed by a ghost. You would then travel to the building, courtesy of an almost-pointless driving section that would last the same amount of time that you had been moving around the map.

Once you were at the building, you would position two of your ghostbusters, who on the C64 looked more like yellow stick-men then Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis or the other one, and attempt to catch a ghost that was aimlessly hovering around. Nabbing the ghost was a matter of trying to trap it between your two proton streams (which, of course, must not cross), a task that was made harder by the completely random movements of the ghost and the fact that for some reason your ghostbusters couldn’t walk backwards. At the right moment you could hit the fire button and attempt to catch the ghost in your trap: grab it, and you earn some money; fail to do so, and you’re one ghostbuster down (complete with badly-digitised ‘He slimed me’ speech sample) and the city’s psycho-kinetic energy level goes up a notch and Zuul is one step closing to taking over the world.

The ultimate aim of the game is to get a certain amount of money (I think it was about $10,000 but I can’t quite remember) and to then allow the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper to meet at Zuul. You could then go there yourself and attempt to sneak into the building, if you could get past the Marshmallow Man who was doing some kind of bizarre river-dance outside the front of it. I never managed to get past him, unfortunately, but that was apparently the end of the game (on the C64, at least, the NES version apparently had an additional section where you had to climb the stairwell past a load of ghosts).

All in all, it was a pretty good game at the time. I’ve played it since and time has not been completely kind to it, particularly presentation-wise. Whilst once the SID version of the Ray Parker Jr. theme sound might have sounded damned good, it now isn’t quite so pleasant on the ears. I guess it doesn’t help that, over the years, I must have heard it non-stop for hours, as it was the only bit of music in the entire game. Still, a retro classic in many ways, and a game that will always hold a special place in my heart.

Here’s a longplay video of the game from YouTube user DerSchmu: