The Haunted Hoard: Halloween (Atari 2600)

Wizard Video Games tried to bring horror cinema to the Atari 2600 with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but despite the negative reception based both on quality and on the game featuring the player in the role of the killer, they weren’t done trying to adapt slasher films into video games. While they did decide to put the player in the role of the person fighting the villain with their game based on the 1978 film Halloween, the damage had been done to their reputation already, and Halloween for Atari 2600 ended up receiving an odd rollout to stores, some cartridges even having to use white stickers with the name scrawled on instead of proper labels due to the company’s looming bankruptcy. It doesn’t seem like this game would have helped them much even in proper packaging though, for Halloween ends up playing even worse than their previous horror game effort.

Halloween, despite depicting the movie’s poster on the box, doesn’t identify its characters as the expected people. A fan will know that Michael Myers is the murderer in the game, but manual and box both skirt around ever mentioning who he is, perhaps either trying to dodge more controversy or not having the full rights to do so. Whatever the reason, the game does depict him about as well as the Atari 2600 could manage, the knife-wielding masked murderer coming in swinging to a faithful translation of the movie’s theme any time he appears on screen. Taking place in a two story house, you are a babysitter who must run through the house and find the children Michael is aiming to kill, dragging them to safe rooms on either side of the building. The staircases in these safe rooms are the only way to move between the floors, these also being the only area Michael Myers won’t appear to try and cut either you or the kid into bloody bits.

 

Despite being a constant threat as he repeatedly tries to kill the player and the kids, Michael Myers is an awful villain in his Atari game. He can only appear by walking in from either side of the screen or through the walls on the side provided they have one of the doors the player can use to skip forward a few rooms. The thing is, if the player leaves the screen he appeared on, he’ll disappear, reappearing in the new room they switched to eventually from one of his available entry points. He is not pursuing the player so much as randomly appearing from the sides of the screen, and he’s never really fast enough to catch the player unless they’re lingering near the side he’s about to come out of. However, the game does seem to try and spawn him away from the area the player is closer to, making it less likely he’ll just burst out an unfairly catch them. If Michael does catch you, he’ll kill you and get rid of one of your three lives as represented by the jack-o-lanterns at the top of the screen, but a canny player will realize quickly that any time the knife-wielding murderer is blocking their path… they can just quickly leave the screen and reenter in the hopes he’ll spawn differently and they can move forward freely.

Even if you don’t embrace the almost universally useful method of making him disappear by swapping screens, Michael’s usually not too hard to dodge normally. The player can move back and forth and with some degree of vertical movement, and since their opposition is so slow, it can be just as easy to wait lower in the room and, as he approaches, move upwards and walk right past him, Michael unable to cover that space quickly enough to stab you. Once you start racking up points for safe child deliveries he will get speedier and this method of avoiding him gets a bit more difficult, but leaving a room and reentering is almost always capable of evading him, Michael never really seeming to get faster than your character. Despite already being a bit of a chump though, there is yet another way of dealing with your pathetic pursuer, that being to pick up a knife. Your action button briefly switches from being used to pick up and drop off children to stabbing a dinky dagger forward, and if it hits Michael Myers, it will disappear, give you a boost of points, and send the killer scrambling away with a speed that would make him dangerous if he ever used it in the chase.

 

Moving the kids around is at least slightly difficult in that you have to find where they randomly spawned in. Some of the upstairs rooms have flickering lights that mean you might have to stand safely in the middle of a room to let Michael spawn in so you know how to avoid him, but the main danger to carting kids around is that they might appear in a middle room, the walks to the safe areas longer and thus slower as you have to avoid Michael. He’ll move down to try and catch the kid you’re dragging around, and while you’re lugging a child about, your vertical movement won’t impact them, the child getting their own little lane at the bottom where only the kids and the killer can roam. There really isn’t any reason you can’t use the same boring but effective tactic of moving between rooms to despawn and respawn Michael though, and if you really do find yourself in a pickle because Michael spawned right on top of you, you can just ditch the kid as a sacrifice since there is no penalty for letting the child get killed, you just need to find a new one to save.

THE VERDICT: The gameplay loop of Halloween is monumentally dull unless you deliberately play suboptimally. Michael Myer’s only chance of catching the player is if he spawns in on top of them, since otherwise the player can just run off screen to safely make him disappear. The game just drags on even after the killer gets his speed boosts, the task of delivering the children to safety tedious and full of annoyances rather than being anything resembling tense or even really dangerous. It’s a game about racking up points until you get so bored you let the villain kill you just to end the constant uncontested repetition of dragging kids around a house.

 

And so, I give Halloween for Atari 2600…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Once you realize how impotent a threat Michael Myers is, there is nothing left to Halloween. He can be easily defeated by just walking off-screen, his only hope of taking down a player who understands his weakness being when the game drops him in on top of you when you’re at the border of the screen. Hearing his theme quickly becomes old as he constantly proves to be an annoying roadblock to progress rather than an intimidating threat, and little things that could have given him an edge like the flashing lights or hallway entrances just end up making rooms with them more irritating since it complicates the already tedious process of outmaneuvering him. I think nothing demonstrates the absolute emptiness of the gameplay better than a video on Youtube that goes on for two hours with the player only losing two lives while earning over one million points, each kid only worth 675 for saving. With no tricks or cheating they just use the game’s bad design to achieve such a score, the two deaths coming from times Michael Myers spawned right next to them. The simplicity of the house’s two floor design means he couldn’t believably chase you or the killer would never catch you, and the random spawn-in method of his appearance is too easy to manipulate. Michael Myer would need some sort of meaningful and dangerous assistance to make his pursuit possible. Any sense of danger disappears the moment you understand the basics of the game, and going for a high score feels meaningless when your opposition is about as pesky as a house fly rather than as dangerous as the psychotic killer from the film this game is based on.

 

While perhaps an undignified end for this year’s Haunted Hoard, Halloween is also a capstone for a year filled with many highs and lows. Games both awful and excellent were quite common in this year’s look through Halloween-appropriate video games, but it is a bit of a shame the one game that wears the holiday’s name as its title dropped the ball so hard. However, just because the Halloween game happens to be awful doesn’t mean your Halloween should be, so I wish you a happy Halloween and hope that this year’s Haunted Hoard made your whole October both terrifying and terrific!