Atari horror-based games weren't that scary

From X-entertainment: Horror is huge in today's video game market -- it's certainly much bigger than it's ever been before. Of all the emotions video games try to draw from players, "being scared" has benefited enormously from the industry's advances. The massive improvements in graphics, motion and sound have made today's horror games capable of actually frightening a person. This wasn't always so, of course, and the further you go back in video gaming history, the fewer horror-related games you'll find. Some were okay, but most just plainly didn't work...to the point where would-be competing developers didn't bother trying.

Because of their relative rarity, even the suckiest of the sucky horror games from consoles past maintain some level of appeal. They just feel so different. The Atari 2600 had its share of spooky games, and they've generally fallen on the "more sought" side on the collectors' market. The most effective examples forced us to rely mostly on our imagination and sense of dread; the least effective tried to make blocky pixels look scary when it was clearly impossible for blocky pixels to look anything but cute. The game I'm about to spend a few hours writing about falls somewhere in the middle.


Made by Data Age in 1983, Frankenstein's Monster wasn't popular by any stretch. Some have attributed this to the era's video game crash; I think it was more just a case of a game with too small of a core clientele. Face facts: It's the best time of year to be into Frankenstein, and I still had to pull your teeth to get this article read. Being well-known doesn't necessarily correlate with people going ape shit over something, and not very many people were going ape shit for Frankenstein. That's why he was always moaning.

Frankenstein's Monster wasn't a great game, but it had enough nuances to make players only realize that halfway. Upon hearing the title, many would assume one of two things: Either the players portrayed Frankenstein's Monster, or they fought him as some kind of boss character late in the game on a level that's impossible to get to. Neither assumptions are true. What Frankenstein's Monster has going for it is its copious amounts of Frankenstein's Monster sightings. He's with you every step of the way, and not because you're portraying him. No, this was a chance to scratch away the creature's once-prevalent sympathy card, and either kill or be killed by it. Finally, an evil Frankenstein's Monster!

Before we get to the actual levels, it's important to understand just what you're up against. Meet the enemies...



Note that the biggest enemy in the game isn't pictured above: Water. Falling into little lakes is pretty much the only way to lose in Frankenstein's Monster, but I hope you don't take that to mean that the game's a cinch, because falling into little lakes is the hero's specialty. The actual enemies in the game don't kill you; they're mostly there to slow your progress, since you're working against a time limit. When the hero gets hit, he just kinda stands still for a few seconds and gets over it. More dangerous are the enemies who just happen to be situated in the perfect spot to knock you into a death lake.

1.- BATS! Bats cannot hurt the hero, but they can bumrush your character and push him away from his target area, killing time, and in turn, ultimately killing you. It took me five games and three Google searches to come to the conclusion that these were indeed bats.

2.- GHOSTS! I like the ghosts. They look like ghosts, and since they're blue, they look like Pac-Man ghosts after he chugs a happy pill. The ghosts are slow-moving and easy enough to circumvent (despite their ability to float weightlessly, the ghosts cannot move upward when you jump over them), serving more to remind players that they're not allowed to stop and smell the roses when they're all up in Dr. F's hizzy fo shizzy. Keep moving, or yer gonna get ghosted.

3.- FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER! Hells yeah, it's the big man. Players don't directly associate with Frankenstein's Monster during gameplay, but your main objective is to beat the timer and keep him dead. If you fail, he comes alive and makes you dead instead. Tit for tat. Frank's bolts are easily misinterpreted as cheeks, but at least he had the good sense to keep his arms pointed downward in fear of anyone confusing his body with a swastika.

4.- SPIDERS! These guys are just weird. They fall from the ceilings on extremely thick webs, and if nobody's there to land on, they vanish. The spiders are also piss poor at the whole web business, being unable to actually affix their web strands to the ceiling. The whole damned thing falls, web and all. I consider them the toughest of the everyday enemies, but that's probably because they're the only ones smart enough to chill out near the death lakes and greatly increase the likelihood of being credited with our deaths.

5.- GIANT TARANTULAS! More spiders! This time, it's a bunch of free-roaming giant tarantulas who pose nearly no threat but still manage to fuck my shit up because they're tarantulas as big as the character I'm navigating.

And what about the hero? He was never given a proper name as far as I know, but he doesn't need one, because he wears a baseball cap and that's identity enough. The hero's goal is to creep around Dr. Frankenstein's castle dungeon and secretly erect walls around the monster that will, I suppose, preclude Dr. Frankenstein from finishing his deadly creation. Seriously, that's what you're doing: You're building walls around the villain's weapon so he can't get to it. We could only consider this a sound strategy if today was Crazy Day and "sound" actually meant "fucking stupid."



What you see above accounts for almost the whole game. It's three parts Pitfall! and one part Frogger, with the hero needing to hustle his way down three floors of terror before swiping a stone and making his way up again. (More on the stones in a minute.) You'll notice the many pits littering the stage. The ones with little specs underneath them are safe to visit. The specs serve as ropes, allowing the hero to climb up and down floors. If there's no speck, it's all heck: Your hero will fall helplessly, and if there's no solid foundation to catch him on the levels below, he'll land in a lake and die. Luckily, he's allowed to do that three times before the video game gods make him stop.

Octopunk here! The rest of this article includes some moving gif files I don't know how to import so that they still move. You should check it out here, it's well worth it.