The Haunted Hoard: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Atari 2600)

The slasher movie genre may draw in fans with its villains and their creative killing methods, but the plot structure of these horror movies are set up as if the audience is meant to root for the victims, the protagonists being the ones who fight against the crazed killers. It’s little surprise that early video game adaptations of slasher movies like the ones based on Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street have the player in the role of a regular human fighting against Jason and Freddy respectively, but one of the first games ever based on a horror movie actually had the player assume the role of the film’s villain. While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does have one of the more sympathetic villains because Leatherface has been so heavily manipulated by his family to be the way he is, the Atari 2600 game adaptation having the player chainsaw people to death as the main goal didn’t sit well in an era where games still carried a heavy stigma as being targeted towards children. Wizard Video Games received a lot of push back for a design that seems almost quaint when compared to what more modern video games depict, even ones featuring Leatherface doing the same thing as he did back then.

The Atari 2600’s graphical limitations naturally means the violence on display will be nowhere near what the movies could show, but Leatherface himself is definitely the one who got the biggest visual downgrade. His mask of human skin is represented here by a lopsided frowning face, but it’s his weapon of choice that came out looking much worse. Leatherface seems to be wearing a full body blue jumpsuit, and extending out of his chest is a long protrusion with a few lumps on it. This protrusion is actually his chainsaw despite matching his clothes in color, but when it is revved up it at least does a more convincing job of looking like one by rotating the lumps on the false limb to simulate the blades turning. Leatherface’s lack of arms certainly makes his weapon look even stranger, but the design, while ridiculous, does its job well enough, and on a system where sometimes your character is just a square, it does at least approximate the movie character somewhat.

Leatherface’s Atari rampage is motivated by a bunch of tourists stumbling onto his property, and all of them just so happen to be young women in dresses. To earn points, you need to get in range and rev up your chainsaw to cut them to pieces, but there are definitely some complications to this process. First, you must locate a young lady, running to either the left or the right to make the screen scroll in the appropriate direction. As the screen scrolls, it can reveal a few different things, including Leatherface’s main source of woes: bushes and fences. The environment will inhibit Leatherface whenever he runs into an object like a cow skull, fence, or bristles, leading to him coming to a stop for a bit to recover. To escape the thickets you need to turn on your chainsaw, but everything else is just a matter of waiting out the brief stun, something that can also be inflicted by the odd runaway wheelchairs. While they only move when you’re moving, they do seem to move across the screen faster than other environmental objects. There is no set arrangement for how these objects will be placed, meaning it’s even possible to walk back and forth within an area and see different objects appearing, so a need to be ready for anything appearing from the side of the screen is a must to avoid bumping into trouble.

While the stuff laying around the Texas desert will be what slows down Leatherface if he’s not careful, the need to move around is motivated by the constantly fleeing tourists. The moment a girl appears on screen you hear a loud shrill beep that is meant to be them screaming in terror, and then the pursuit begins. You need to be incredibly close to cut into the girls, but you can catch them eventually if you avoid the hazards. Bumping into an object will likely give the girl enough time to scamper off screen, and whether or not she exists after this is a toss up. There is the consolation that sometimes moving the screen back and forth will eventually reveal a girl, but if you spot one it is smart to pursue, because as long as you can weave your way towards her, you can start the last part of the chase. Once you get close enough to the young lady, she may decide to teleport to your other side. Keep after her, and she may do it again and again, baiting out chainsaw activations as she moves to the other side of you to keep running away. Some tactics like quickly turning around once you reach the range where she might teleport do a decent job of catching the girls unawares and other times they just won’t teleport at all, allowing you to get your attack in, but this unpredictable teleportation definitely hurts a game that could have been challenging enough just with having to pace your running so you didn’t slam into a fence or wheelchair by going too quickly.

So far, most of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is essentially just an Atari score attack game with the odd annoyance of teleporting teenagers, but where the game lets its design down is its fuel gauge. At the top of the screen you’ll see you have a bar that’s slowly depleting automatically, this essentially being a timer for how long your rampage can last. Any time you activate your chainsaw, the gauge depletes faster, making obstacles like the brush much more dangerous as they wear down your reserves on something besides slicing up tourists. The teleportation really becomes a problem because of the limited gas, since you can’t predict too well if it’s the right time to turn it on or if the girl might appear behind you when you almost had her in reach. Getting better at movement and predicting the girls can help you not waste gas, but there is a deeper problem than just pacing activations of the chainsaw well. The only time you can refill your fuel is when you’ve earned 5,000 points, or in simpler terms, after cutting apart five girls. While you start the game with three full tanks that act like lives, the time it takes to chase down five tourists usually depletes a good bit of the first tank, and when you get your refill, it’s not a full top off. To get five more victims before the refilled tank empties would be quite a feat thanks to the general speed of the game and the need to find the girls in the first place, so you’ll end up forced into using your second tank, where the same process will inevitably occur until you’re on your last tank and then completely out. There is a game speed increase when you’ve reached enough points that only makes it more likely you’ll lose time to bumping into objects, but even with a lot of practice it seems impossible to play The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for too long.

This fuel limitation makes it pretty easy to see why many might put it among the worst games of all time as you can barely get going before you’re forced to wrap up and start again, but within these tight confines it is still possible to develop some skill in the game and go for a high score, just not one that’s ever going to reach the great heights of more open experiences. If the fuel depleted a bit more slowly, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre might not be a good game, but it would be fair enough to make shooting for the high scores decent, and the little bit of wiggle room to do so in the game’s current state I think prevents it from being completely irredeemable. The girls teleporting around can be annoying, but the chase design almost works, you just don’t get to play it long enough to really get invested in the score challenge since the fuel gauge isn’t designed in your favor.

THE VERDICT: Leatherface’s quest to cut up trespassers in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an ill-fated one not just for his victims, but for the player as well. The fuel gauge serves as a time limit that is essentially incompatible with the game design, the opportunities to refuel not lenient enough to get a game session going where they can earn a lot of points. The design of the chase could work for a score challenge game, the obstacles being proper impediments with a decent bit of variety to them, but while there is some room to improve your movement and methods for somewhat higher scores, the girls you need to catch don’t appear often enough and have a strange teleportation power that means you’ll never be able to refuel often enough within the time crunch.

And so, I give The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. Marginally improving your skill within the confines of this game’s unfortunate time limit isn’t very rewarding, but it does at least keep this from being complete garbage. Leatherface may be ugly and the shrieking sound effect shrill, but the gameplay had potential, the girls probably needing something fairer than teleportation to defend themselves but the obstacles to your mad dashes still providing enough challenge on their own that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn’t need to so heavily limit your playtime to try and make things difficult. While there would definitely need to be some sort of failure state, the current form of the game makes it inevitable that even a well-performing player won’t last very long or score very high, and all it would take to improve the game would be giving you better ways to earn more gas or just reduce the cost of using the chainsaw. It would definitely require more refining to make it into a good game, but there is a faint glimmer of the game it could be still present that keeps this from being a complete trainwreck. It ultimately doesn’t quite muster up the full on frustration or boredom that a truly atrocious title achieves with awful design decisions.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is definitely terrible all the same though, and as one of the first video games to try and bring horror into the gaming realm, it definitely doesn’t impress. Playing as the villain was certainly an interesting direction for Wizard Video Games to take, but while slasher films often depict their antagonists as almost near unstoppable forces, the player will find their play sessions stopping too early, the character running out of gas before things can ever get rolling.