Ghosts’n Goblins is yet another conversion of an existing game which started out at the arcades. I can’t help but approach this one a bit differently, in that I have actually played the version on Nintendo’s NES console, which may not be the original but is close to its vision and can claim to be the definitive popular version. That makes this a useful point to talk about a ghost that has been haunting this part of the AAA story, never fully present: Nintendo.
In the ‘80s, the NES (or in its original Japanese incarnation, the Family Computer – Famicom for short) had a transformative impact on the huge Japanese games market, and something approaching the same in America. It is inescapable in video game history. In the UK, things didn’t go the same way. Because of everything I’ve been writing about so far, there was nothing like the same vacuum for it to move into. Our own flourishing scene couldn’t be displaced just yet, and it wasn’t just because of incumbent’s advantage. New Spectrum and Commodore 64 games, generally priced around £9.99, were roughly one fifth of the price of NES games. Once the paperback-like budget games market took off, make that one fifteenth of the price. Stacked up against that fact, whatever impressive capabilities and games the NES had to offer were a difficult sell, and perhaps the UK wasn’t a big enough market to be worth the effort. Nintendo didn’t even co-ordinate its approach across the UK and our actual neighbours and instead bracketed us with Australia and New Zealand.
The influence of NES games in the UK was still significant, and for the most part nothing stopped companies from licensing Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions of those impressive games and their arcade counterparts. But because Nintendo made not only games but the console to play them on, they had a strong incentive not to licence out their own games for other computers. As such, some of the biggest games of all – Mario, Zelda, and the rest – stayed on the NES and didn’t reach the UK mass-market in the same way as the supporting efforts of other companies on Nintendo’s console did. In our list of UK #1s, Ghosts’n Goblins, made originally by Capcom, is as big as we get for an official home computer conversion of an iconic ‘80s NES game.
Even if they weren’t directly adjacent in this list, it would be immediately obvious to compare Ghosts’n Goblins with Green Beret because it is, functionally, largely the same game. Move left to right, deal with oncoming enemies, take advantage of platforms there which offer you the chance to get above or below the enemies but aren’t really the focus in any other sense. Rather than assaulting a Russian army base, though, you’re a literal knight in shining armour called Arthur, rescuing a princess who has been carried off to the underworld, filled with demons and zombies and, yes, probably ghosts and goblins. That serves to make Ghosts’n Goblins the more realistic of the two games, in that it’s freer to make up its own rules without breaking its supposed setting. It also offers another alternative to shooting or stabbing – throwing knives! – and a not very reassuring replacement to completely instant death in which one hit destroys Arthur’s armour and he must fight on in his undies.
That Spectrum version of Ghosts’n Goblins is another echo of the not-present, a heavily simplified take just about recognisable as the same game. It crucially gets across the ragdoll leaping and satisfying lance-flinging of the main character, how action works in motion always being one of the most important aspects of the feel of a game. It has a stab at the game’s intro, too, reducing its already laughably archetypal princess-kidnapped-by-demon sequence to an even more condensed form. Elsewhere it has to more severely compromise. Once you get going, a lot less happens at any one time in this version, which amongst other things serves to make playing it easier, if not easy. Keeping track of what two zombies are doing is much easier than five. It doesn’t reinforce a sense of creeping horror through gameplay in the same way as the NES version, but there is an unlikely compensation.
The most startling decision in the Spectrum Ghosts’n Goblins is the way that it doesn’t work around the Spectrum’s unfortunate inability to put two different colour things next to each other, the way that some others like Green Beret make everything out of so many neat outlines that it’s a bit less obvious. Ghosts’n Goblins doesn’t even just ignore the issue; it positively embraces it. The landscape seeps through Arthur at all times, rendering him green or yellow or cyan based on whatever he has been standing in front of. He becomes a spectral figure. When he loses his armour, it’s barely noticeable; perhaps it wasn’t ever really there. His very existence is challenged by this hell world he must face. Rather than just coming off as inept, it all gives playing this version a spooky quality of its own. To fight the ghosts, you must become a ghost.
