Games based on movies go back a long way, including in the UK’s games charts. Earlier in 1984, the charts played host to Richard Wilcox Software’s Blue Thunder, which took inspiration from the helicopter action film that had topped the UK box office for two weeks the previous year. The first comprehensive UK chart I used, from June 1983 (the one with loosely King Kong-inspired Donkey King at #1) had E.T. Phone Home at #27. Movie games were not yet the dominant force that they would become later in the decade though. That potential was first demonstrated by one combination of inspiration, marketing, and a generous helping of luck. The game in question was Activision’s Ghostbusters, top of the UK charts for seven weeks as 1984 turned into 1985.

  • Blue Thunder (Richard Wilcox Games, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • E.T. Phone Home (Atari, 1983, Atari 400)

It went like this. Some time shortly before the release of the film Ghostbusters, Activision agreed a deal to make a game version of it. Wanting to make the most of association with the film at the height of its likely success, they asked if any of their programmers would be able to code that game in six weeks. This was the kind of rapid approach which had contributed to some disasters in the past, notably Atari’s infamous E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in 1982. David Crane had a plan to avoid a similar outcome, and said yes.

Not long before, it would have made sense for Crane to make Ghostbusters as a console game like his last three games: Pitfall!, its sequel, and The Activision Decathlon. Thanks to the North American video game crash of 1983, Crane was instead now working on the Commodore 64. His plan for Ghostbusters was based on the idea that he would not have to make it from scratch in six weeks. Partly this was because the time of solo developers was ending; as well as Crane, Ghostbusters would be the work of Hilary Mills on art, Russell Lieblich on music, and a few others with smaller roles. Even more importantly, though, they wouldn’t start from scratch, because they would convert a game Crane was already making into Ghostbusters.

The existing game was one called Car Wars, in which you would buy upgrades to turn your car into a machine of destruction and take it out on the road to battle. I can’t find anything which confirms that Car Wars would have been based on the 1981 tabletop game of the same name by Chad Irby and Steve Jackson, but it seems an unlikely coincidence if not. It’s interesting to see that this recycling was not a hidden secret, but something David Crane would happily talk about on a PBS TV show just a few months later.

Crane made use of the systems already developed for Car Wars, for driving around a city and upgrading your car. He tweaked them just a little so that it was assorted ghostbusting equipment that you load it up with. This tied in with the film’s prominent car, although, as he would soon note, the film does not actually involve driving around sucking up ghosts with a vacuum attached to said car.

With little chance to incorporate the specifics of the movie, the game sees you as a new franchised outpost of the Ghostbusters staffed with unnamed men. You are nonetheless tasked with saving New York in place of the movie’s team. To the Car Wars stuff, the Activision team added a ghost-catching minigame in which you position a trap and two men firing beams, and try to shepherd the ghost into place. This is a relatively small part of the game. You spend a decent amount of the time just driving around the city, a fine way of stalling for time which outlives just about anything else in Ghostbusters as something which games still do.

What you spend even more time doing is admin. Even after the initial phase in which you set up your operation and kit out your car. Once you’re out and catching ghosts, you have a lot of going back to HQ to recharge, and reinvesting your money is at least as essential as doing anything to prevent the oncoming apocalypse. Ghostbusters is not a good ghostbusting sim, but a decent precarious small business sim. There is just about enough of a sense of the film to work, helped enormously by the intro which plays an impressive version of the theme song. That comes complete with lyrics, bouncing ball, and a chance to press the space bar at the right moment to trigger a “Ghostbusters!” synthesised speech sample.

A read of the broadly positive UK reviews of the Commodore 64 game make clear how important the music was to its success. “The most enjoyable aspect of the game is the astounding musical score” said Commodore Horizons. Samantha Hemens of Personal Computer Games found herself “bopping around on the chair”. “I have never heard such a remarkable interpretation of a pop song on a home computer before” said Paul Bond in Your Computer. 

Looking at the reviews more widely, it’s interesting to see David Crane’s name getting more British recognition in the wake of The Activision Decathlon. Commodore User’s review starts with a general suspicion of games of films but then “put at ease” on the basis of it being by Crane. The same review says that “in true American tradition the idea of the game is to make as much money as possible”, a theme also picked up by Your Computer, referencing “the uniquely American commercialisation of the spirit world”.

Despite the advantages of starting with the Car Wars framework in place, it took a fair bit longer than six weeks to turn Ghostbusters the game around. It appears to have made it out in the US in October at the earliest, more than four months after the movie’s release. Luckily for Activision, the film was a hit on such an incredible scale that it had only left the top of the box office for the final time shortly before that, fifteen weeks after its release. US games magazine Computer Entertainer listed Ghostbusters as #6 in the US computer games charts in its December 1984 issue.

The same issue of Computer Entertainer also carried a story headlined “Ghostbusters Takes Over Europe!”. This neatly summarises the combination of factors which made that happen: “the movie just opening there in addition to the fact that Europeans are still wild about games”. Activision may have missed out on a simultaneous US release, but the then-normal delay to the movie’s UK release meant that the game actually made it here a couple of weeks before the movie, at the perfect point for peak hype. That was also months after Ray Parker Jr.’s theme song had reached #2 in the UK chart, which meant that the song’s prominence in the game was another point in its favour. Anticipation duly built, with Sinclair Programs writing “surely no program can have achieved as much popularity before its launch as has Ghostbusters.”

  • Ghostbusters (Activision, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Ghostbusters (Activision, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

Activision also smartly had a Spectrum version of Ghostbusters ready to go soon after the Commodore 64 one. The conversion was handled by James Software, veterans of Activision Spectrum ports including Enduro and Space Shuttle: A Journey Into Space. As Computer & Video Games put it, “the game follows the Commodore format faithfully – even down to a brave attempt at speech synthesis”. Spectrum specialist magazine Crash made the similarly brave claim that “the graphics are no different on the Spectrum version whatsoever”. Though even they had to acknowledge that the relative lack of sound contributed to a version which “lacks distinctly in content”.

Even though lukewarm reviews reflected that the Spectrum version didn’t live up to the C64 version, it was close enough to become a success too. By the end of the year, the sales across the two versions were collectively enough to overhaul the phenomenon of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. Ghostbusters then stuck at the top of the charts into February 1985, staying there even after the film had fallen down the box office charts. The game even went back to #1 in 1988 when released on Mastertronic’s reissue label Ricochet. It may have taken an unlikely combination of luck and just enough quality for Ghostbusters the game to become a success, but some British games companies took notice. Soon hit movie tie-ins would be a lot more common.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 31 December 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 08 January 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 15 January 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 23 January 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 30 January 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 05 February 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 12 February 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 05 March 1988, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 12 March 1988, The Guardian
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 16 April 1988, The Guardian
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 11 June 1988, The Guardian

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