| 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! |
Oh how this game teased us. Oh how the cool cassette cover promised so much. And how it delivered so little. I doubt anyone ever actually finished this game. I assume, like me, most people ripped the cassette out of the tape-drive and hurled it across the bedroom. Screaming obscenities at the screen, and wishing you'd bought Monty On The Run, with that cool Rob Hubbard soundtrack.
Weird Retro Fact: Ever wondered how many kills did Jason make during the whole Friday The 13th franchise? Satisfy your trivia geek, with our run-down of kills in the blog post Mid-Week Movie Massacre: Jason Voorhees.
