Ghostbusters

Development

From Brad Fregger, Producer of Ghostbusters:

The game developers at Activision would often take the afternoon off to see a new movie that was exciting to us. One day we all decided to see Ghostbusters on the opening day. After the movie David Crane (Pitfall and Pitfall II) announced that he was going to do the game. As a founder of Activision, he had the power to get the wheels in motion and within a week we we're beginning development.

Crane had already been working on what would become the game, and made a beta version with the driving and franchising elements, but it wasn't until getting the Ghostbusters license that he had a setting for those game elements. The title screen sing-a-long feature of the computer version was not added until the week before the game was finished. In Retro Gamer 25 Crane mentioned that the game was created in six weeks. Normally it wouldn't be possible to create a game in such a short amount of time but Crane had a working engine of a racing game Car Wars. Thanks to the resource allocation segment that was embedded into the game, it was easy to replace guns, missiles and rockets into more Ghostbusters themed armaments. In the same issue of Retro Gamer Crane said that the original version of the game was created in 1984 on C64 and later, in 1985, it was ported to Atari 2600, Amstrad, Spectrum and MSX. SMS version appeared in 1987 and Mega Drive in 1990 however none of the people who were involved in creation of the original were not participating in the works over the last two versions.

License

Like the cartoon based on the movies, Activision was not allowed to use the likeness of the actors that performed in the movie.

Music

The game title music and speech based on the original theme music from the movie written by Ray Parker Jr.

NES version

The NES version of the game differs in a few ways from its computer counterparts. First, the driving sequences feature a "zoomed out" perspective, meaning that the Ghostbusters car is smaller on the screen and that there is more road to manuver over. Also, gone is the ability to purchase different vehicles (which was in all versions of the game). By contrast, there are more items to buy and equip from the shop than other versions. Finally, the NES version features a unique Temple of Zuul sequence at the end of the game where the Ghostbusters must slowly climb the stairwell of the building to the rooftop, avoiding the touch of enemy ghosts that fly around.

Sales

According to the magazine Retro Gamer (issue #1), the game was Mastertronic's #2 best selling game (412.922 copies).

Winston Zeddmore

Interestingly, the game does not portray, or even reference, Winston Zeddmore – Ernie Hudson's character in the film, and the sole black Ghostbuster. He does later appear in the game version of Ghostbusters II.

ZX Spectrum versions

• Spectrum first version
  • In the rush for a pre-Christmas release, the Spectrum version did not work with the popular Kempston joystick interface. Even worse, the game crashed on selecting this joystick add-on. According to ACE (issue #15), thousands of copies had to be replaced with a working version.
• 128K version
  • Two years after the 48K release an enhanced version of the game appeared. The only new addition was a funky AY version of Ray Parker Junior's theme song.

Awards

• Happy Computer
  • Issue 02/1986 - #4 Best Game in 1985 (Readers' Vote)* Zzap!
  • Issue 01/1985 - #6 It's the Zzap! 64 Top 64!

Information also contributed by BurningStickMan, Garcia, Scott Monster and WildKard