The Haunted Hoard: Frankenstein’s Monster (Atari 2600)

Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s Monster seem to be a bit of an unholy trinity for classic movie monsters, but while vampires and werewolves can still terrify modern audiences, Dr. Frankenstein’s creation seems to have lost his edge. Perhaps the patchwork human’s impact was weakened by the rise of zombie horror, but there does seem to be one platform where the groaning green monster succeeded more than any other creature: the Atari 2600. Atari graphics aren’t really able to create anything scary with the limited amount of blocks and colors on offer, but Frankenstein’s Monster manages to be tense with one of the most timeless ways to make a player anxious: a time crunch.

 

In Frankenstein’s Monster, Mary Shelley’s classic character is being brought to life atop Frankenstein’s castle. Once enough lightning has struck the creature, he will come to life and begin a deadly rampage, but the player’s unnamed character hopes to contain him before he’s gathered enough energy. Depending on your difficulty, the monster will either need five minutes or eight and a half minutes to achieve full power, and rather than displaying this in a traditional ticking clock, you instead see the creature’s clear white body gradually fill up with green after each lightning strike, a much more ominous method of making you feel like your time is gradually running out. While the monster isn’t too terrifying due to his strange shape, he does loom over the levels as you play, and if you end up getting a Game Over, the loud pounding sounds and gradual stomping of the monster towards the screen make him about as threatening as an Atari 2600 character can be.

To seal up the monster, the player must repeatedly venture down into the castle to grab bricks which will be used to build a wall around the creature. There are three layers to the castle layout, each with their own hazards. The top layer is where Frankenstein’s creation rests, but a small little ghost patrols the area to prevent you from reaching it once you have the brick. Touching the ghost or any enemy only leads to a brief stop and a point penalty, but in a game with a tight timer, getting bumped into too often can lead to a lot of important time lost. Climbing down to the middle layer will have the player face crawling spiders and open pits, the spiders as dangerous as the ghost but the pits being potentially useful. While the drop from falling down one is sometimes fatal, you can use them strategically if there is some ground beneath them, losing some points for taking the quick route but the shortcut helping with the initial descent. The bottom layer of the castle is the only one where you can truly die. Dropping into the pool of water the game’s manual calls acid is the only way you can lose one of your few lives, so caution is definitely necessary at this crucial point in the adventure. In this bottom layer spiders will drop down from the ceiling at regular intervals in somewhat random locations, but timing the jumps across the water’s platforms well should let you get to the brick and then begin the ascent, facing the same obstacles as you head up to reach the monster.

 

Placing the brick isn’t as easy as just approaching Frankenstein’s creation though. Once you reach the green box beneath him, you must suddenly run vertically against a tide of vampire bats. While most of the game is a 2D platformer, this running segment asks you to dash upwards towards where Frankenstein sits, an absurd amount of bats flying down towards you to knock you back. Their numbers and speed make it hard to spot the patterns in their movements and openings you can squeak through, but if you must you can brute force it, and you can eventually pick up on how to move through it if you watch closely despite it being such a chaotic portion of the gameplay.

Once your first brick is placed, the layout of the castle changes slightly, and this will happen every round until you’ve placed six bricks around the patchwork man. A few things remain consistent like the little shuffling ghost and the ropes you need to climb up and down are never tampered with, but the spiders in the middle row can change in numbers or size and the open pits move around. However, the logs in the water are the objects with the most impactful changes. Changing size, number, movement, or even disappearing briefly, the logs have deadly consequences if you fail your jumps, so spacing jumps across them properly is perhaps the biggest challenge in Frankenstein’s Monster. The jump is a little stiff but not so much so that you can’t predict its arc, but the main consideration is definitely where you start it from. Crossing small logs definitely requires you to start at the right spot when you leap, but consistent arc size means you can acclimate to the requirement and execute it fairly well if the ceiling spiders don’t interfere. The bat segments before placing the brick will change each trip as well, the bats and disappearing logs definitely being the biggest time burners, but the game is structured to be completed in its time limits with quick, smart movement, and that’s what makes it a rather exciting little game.

 

Inevitably, a game made to be beat in five to eight minutes isn’t going to have too much in it, but the small length makes it easy to hop back in after a failure as you gradually learn what troubles you’ll face in trying to take down the monster. The six different layouts for the castle, while not drastically different, do shift up the action and ask you to behave in different ways, and while disappearing logs do feel more like time wasters than interesting mechanics, Frankenstein’s Monster doesn’t feel like it’s being too cheap with its time crunch. The need to be quick yet precise encourages small decisions like whether to use the pits to skip ahead or if you’ll risk jumping onto a moving log even though the ceiling spiders might come down soon. Having a goal to shoot for instead of just a high score challenge also means there are different objectives to shoot for. A player focused solely on completion can happily take hits from enemies if it means they can get somewhere faster, but a high score focused player will need to be even smarter about how they handle the enemies in the castle, although the bat section seems designed to drain points from even the most studious high score chasers. A clear end point does pair well with the time crunch, the game being a win or lose situation based on your performance rather than the player trying to earn as many points as they can before a timer ends the experience.

THE VERDICT: Frankenstein’s Monster would be a simple game if all it had were its six stages, but the pressure of the creature’s slowly building energy makes it into a game that mixes speed and precision into a tense balancing act. Having to weigh the benefits of speeding through an area with the consequences of messing up makes Frankenstein’s Monster into a game of risk and reward, the timer a reasonable length to apply pressure without straining the level design. The frantic bat swarm segments aren’t the best, but most aspects of Frankenstein’s Monster come together into an interesting experience with a clear achievable end goal to motivate the player to keep trying to win even after a defeat.

 

And so, I give Frankenstein’s Monster for the Atari 2600…

A GOOD rating. As seen in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a timer can kill the enjoyment of some Atari games, but Frankenstein’s Monster uses it well and in an appropriate manner. The goal of the game is not just containing the monster, but doing so quickly enough to avoid a game over. The timer is the main antagonist, with only really the acid pit to serve as some other means of truly inhibiting your goal, so every moment where you face a spider or need to time your log jumps is made more crucial because of the risk of losing time. Keeping the game’s overall length pretty small prevents things from being too frustrating despite the precision required from some jumps and the chaotic vampire bat dodging segments. A clear end goal and the changing level designs on the way to achieving it means the player won’t exhaust be just endlessly pressing against the same familiar challenge, and while score does feel secondary here, most activities that are good or bad benefit or inhibit objective focused runs and high score challenges equally, only the pit drops really differing between run types.

 

While it is still fairly simple in overall scope, Frankenstein’s Monster provides a surmountable challenge and pushes back against the player enough to make taking down the monster a satisfying conclusion. For the Halloween staple that time hasn’t helped much, Frankenstein’s creature headlines a highlight of the Atari library thanks to the game’s relationship between level design and time crunch, the looming threat of failure and the need to perform well across the castle’s different layouts making the action more interesting than just the game’s basic mechanics.