Back in the primitive days of video gaming, the best most homes could hope for was a TV console with a series of generic Pong style paddle and ball based games. The Magnavox Odyssey was the world's first commercial home video game console. It was first demonstrated in April 1972. 

If you scanned the shelves of most video game stores, you wouldn't think that video gaming and Christianity were two things that go together. Most games are filled with all manner of unholy horrors, with their themes of death and destruction, just look at the Sodom and Gomorrah that is the Grand Theft Auto series of games for example.

However there have been a few small game makers that have dipped into scripture and released righteous video games for kids. One such example is Captain Bible in Dome Of Darkness, produced by Bridgestone Multimedia Group in 1994, for PC platforms.

Just what ever child wants, to play a superhero that defeats evil right? Whether driven by the "good book" or not, kids will still want to play it right? Wrong! As Captain Bible is simply dumb, and that's got nothing to do with its theme. Really it says it all at the top of the box, "Educational Adventure", two words that should never grace the from of a video game box. As it's the kiss of death for any piece of software.

Produced as a tie-in the classic 1978 Romero zombie movie, Dawn Of The Dead the board game is now a rare find. Produced by the popular board game RPG game makers SPI, it's been disparagingly described as a cross between the board game Mall Madness and a zombie apocalypse. It's an early example of a board game for adults, where the goal is for the zombie to kill the humans, or for the humans to secure the four mall entrances. And offing all the zombies inside the mall, sniper style.

The game can be played with between 1 to 4 players. Yes that's right, you can play it on your own, if you are that geeky. In fact the website boardgamegeek actually recommends that the best way to play is on your own. Rather than playing with yourself, that's a totally different thing altogether and shouldn't involve zombies!

Not a perfect game, but a fun game all the same for any board game / zombie horror geeks out there. Which I know there are many. So because the game is so old, and out of copyright, it's available on the Weird Wide Web. You can get hold of all the game parts you need, and even an updated version, with a new map. Just print it off, maybe laminate it, and play away!

Link: Home Page Of The Dead

Developed and produced by the book publisher Hodder & Stoughton, and based on horror writer James Herbert's 1974 novel of the same name, The Rats came out in 1985. The game was a strange mix of governmental strategy simulation, text adventure and survival horror. How that one got past the initial development pitch is anyone's guess. Anyway the game was released on the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, but not on the Amstrad CPC. Though a version was planned, but never released.

The apparent juxtaposition of different games was generally well received on release. For an 8-bit game, with limited sound and graphics, it was surprisingly creepy and atmospheric. The game starts like a novel, with a prologue is written out in bold white letters across a black screen to setting the scene. Then a pool of torchlight is seen wandering around in the blackness, sudeenly red eyes appear in the dark. A heartbeat sound quickens. Suddenly, a rat pounces into view! Then blood-spattered screen, with eerie accompanying theme music.

Another among the many movie tie-in games that appeared in the 1980s is RoboCop in 1989, produced for the home computer by the British company Ocean Software. Most of the versions that appeared were a reworking of the arcade game, published by Data East and Nihon Bussan, but licensed by Ocean. The Commodore 64 version was a uniquely different game, and notorious in the European version for being very "buggy". And so became an infamously bad game on that platform. 

The ZX Spectrum version however was a great success. Considered by many to be better than the arcade version. High praise indeed, for a platform that was well known for less than impressive graphics and sound. With The game became one of the highest selling of all time on the ZX Spectrum, and stayed at the number one spot in the sales charts for over a year and a half. It was voted the 9th greatest game of all time by Your Sinclair magazine.

The side-scrolling, shoot'em-up, come beat 'em-up platformer, referred to in geek gaming circles as a run 'n' gun, had the eponymous hero advances through various stages that are taken from the 1987 movie. The bonus screen is a target shooting range that uses a first-person perspective. The arcade and home computer versions also featured examples of digitised speech,sampled from the soundtrack of the movie.

The C64 version had a cheat mode, where by you could skip levels. Which was great, for a notoriously difficult and bugged version of the game. Nothing unusual about a cheat mode in a game, except the cheats showed the makers love of the singer Morrissey from the 80s band The Smiths. As the cheats you typed in were from Morrissey songs, "Suedehead" and "Disappointed" . And "disappointed" was just about right for C64 owners of this particular game.

A computer game for the Commodore 64 from 1984, that despite its really low grade graphics (even for the time), it redeemed itself with relatively good game play and what was for the time rare and innovative sampled speech.

Space Taxi was released by MUSE Software, and was a twist on the popular lunar-lander style game of the period, which there seemed to be quite a few of as I recall. I remember typing in the whole code for Rox 64, for example, that appeared in a 1984 copy of C+VG. Only to discover afterwards that I could have saved the hours and hours of work, by just buying it for a couple of quid, as it had been originally written by early gaming genius Jeff Minter and released by his Llamasoft label in 1983.

Anyway, I digress, back to Space Taxi. Despite the dodgy graphics, the game featured some quirky scenes, such as a beach scene, candyland and a snow strewn winter scene. All utterly random, but adding to the fun of what was underneath a pretty standard game.

In 1981, MUSE had released the now absolute classic Castle Wolfenstein, in which was included some of the very earliest synthesised speech in home computer gaming. The games creator Silas Warner, had developed a piece of sound engine software called "The Voice" while working for MUSE. It would appear that the same technology was used for the speech elements of Space Taxi, with calls of "Hey taxi!" and "Pad one please!"

Space Taxi was originally written by John Kutcher, with Silas Warner as the games composer. The game was ported to the Amiga by Andreas Spreen. The ported version, however, had a different set of levels and minor modifications to the game rules. In 2004, Space Taxi 2, an authorised sequel was released by Twilight Games. As well as Space Taxi: Remake that same year, by Michael LeSauvage. Who knew, that it had such a cult following?

Now I've covered retro horror game movie tie-ins before, so coming round eventually to the abomination that was the Friday The 13th computer game cash-in, was inevitable at some point. The game came out for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC in 1985, so around the same time Friday The 13th franchise was hitting deplorable mid-period, with Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985). Not that we knew that at the time. Only if we could have seen into the future, and know that Jason X (2001) was coming, and that the series could actually get much, much worse.

The game was (and excuse my language here) fucking terrible!!! I mean not just the bad graphics, you half expected that as an 80s gamer. No, the whole premise, the whole game, everything about it was horrific. And not in a good way. The Spectrum version didn't even have any sound in it!

You start out the game with two tasks. One to find sanctuary, and one to find and kill Jason. Obvious?! Not so, as Jason doesn't appear in the game as "Jason", he's in disguise! Yep that's right, you have to wander around killing everyone, in order to find which one is Jason. Making you more of a mass-murdering psychopath than our eponymous zombie slasher. Oh and talking of "zombies", a glitch in the C64 version meant that if you attacked a freshly slain corpse, it would come back to life!

The C64 version did have one redeeming feature, that a kill gave you a "digitised" (using the term very loosely) image of a brutally slaughtered victim, and a pretty cool (for the time) digitised scream. So you went around trying to find Jason, and eventually came across him. Now if you managed to kill him with a whole load of crazy button tapping, then unfortunately it wasn't "game over". Oh no, the designers decided to make you suffer. Suffer by having to play the whole thing again. Not just once, you had to play the game through five times to complete it!

Election time is rolling round in the UK, so time to look at one of the retro games of the 80s glory days of home computing, with the 1987 game from Virgin, Election. The game was available of the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. In the game you could play parodies of political leaders of the time, or bizarrely Paul Daniels (the magician) as the leader of the Idealist Party.

The idea of the game was to wander around (as a giant floating head) meeting and canvassing other characters. But the best part, as it is in politics itself, is the ability to "slur" your opposition. Turning them (as the game says), into "a political banana". And the actual character turning into something the vaguely resembles an actual banana. If you manage to achieve 101 votes you are elected, and become Prime Minister. Celebrated by the worst game-ending ever. As the screen congratulates you with "WELL DONE PRIME MINISTER", and bunch of crappy balloons float up the screen.

I recently wrote about Phantasmagoria the 1995, FMV point-and-click adventure game, that was considered one the most controversial games of its time, due the graphic violence it contained. However a year later, a game came out that possibly trumped it. And if it wasn't for a delay in publishing, it may well have been hailed as the most controversial adventure game of the mid-90s. 

Harvester was designed to shock, to be controversial, it described itself as "The most violent adventure game of all time." Originally scheduled for release in 1994, the game didn't hit the shelves until 1996. The game was an all out assault on the media hype that video gaming made players violent. It was a no-holds-barred bloody gore-fest, where you kill pretty much just kill whoever you wanted. The deaths were brutal and bloody.

Like an exploitation film, much of the game is laughably tongue-in-cheek. Th makers knew who they were offending and who they were entertaining. It's not a great game, it's confusing at times, conversations with NPCs is stilted and seemingly pointless. But hey, aren't they also the characteristics of a good exploitation flick? Take it for what it is, don't take it too seriously, and just keep repeating to yourself... It's just a game... It's just a game!

Cybernetic revolt, the technological singularity! Is it just a matter of time now, rather than science fiction? Horror and sci-fi movies, literature and computer games have been warning us for years of the inevitable/possibility of a computer taking over and controlling humanity.

One of the seminal movies that addresses this is the 1970 sci-fi thriller, Colossus: The Forbin Project. Based on a 1966 sci-fi novel Colossus, by D.F. Jones. In the story a massive AI computer, designed to control the United States nuclear defence system, becomes sentient. Colossus becomes aware of the existence of a Soviet supercomputer, like itself. The two computers start to communicate, but their link is cut by their governments. So the two computers launch nuclear attacks on each other's country, until their link is re-established. The two computers become one entity, and proclaims itself "the voice of World Control". Making its mission to end war among humans. The human choice? They have none! They must accept that with peace comes control, its control, and that "freedom is just an illusion".

Below are other links to posts that cover computers/entities that have managed to or tried to take-over humanity. Now... That give me an idea for an article about computers that take over the world!

The Revolution Started Here: Beneath A Steel Sky- The "revolutionary" adventure game from a small software house in Hull, that went up against the big U.S. software houses, and kicked arse!

EarthBound: The Trippiest And Most Fucked-Up Cutesy RPG Ever! - The weird world of the SNES game from 1994. How it mirrored real world events, and created a nightmare.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream (1967) - Harlan Ellison short-story about a computer that take over the world, that was made into a creepy 1995 point-and-click adventure game.