Despite being a huge fan of the movies and an old Atari 2600 veteran, I’ve barely ever played Halloween on there. And by barely ever, I mean I had a go a few years back when I first discovered it existed, didn’t know what I was doing, and never played it again! It’s also odd that I never knew it existed at the time, given my best friend, who had the console, got onto the school bus most mornings with tales of the latest video nasty he’d watched the night before, thanks to having much older brothers and sisters… By the time I got to fall in love with The Evil Dead, The Entity and The Omen years later, I already knew the worst of them quite intimately! The game, though, never crossed our collective transom and so for me at least, lay mostly dormant until along came From Ants to Zombies: Six Decades of Video Game Horror by Bitmap Books in 2023, where four glorious pages not only celebrate the game but also gave me a clue what was going on, so at what seemed like an opportune moment, here we are!

As I just implied, I do have a bit more history with the films than I do the game, although beyond telling you that, I’m afraid I don’t really have much of interest to relate on that front… I’m fortunate enough to be old enough to have rented the first four of them on VHS in time to then see the last couple of the original set at the cinema, and equally I’m unfortunate enough to have been enough of a sucker to have had the same experience with everything that followed! It’s not all bad though, as we’ll find out, and what’s good it really good – top twenty favourite films ever good, in fact! Which does slightly dampen my enthusiasm for my plan to have a really quick run-through of the movies to discover my favourite Halloween alongside a proper look at the game because I already know the answer, but I think we can have some fun getting there anyway! And I really enjoyed doing the same for Friday the 13th with Splatterhouse II on the Sega Mega Drive, and A Nightmare on Elm Street on the NES over the past few Halloweens, so it will be good to complete the set of big-hitting slashers regardless.

Right, let’s go to the movies! By my count there are thirteen of them as I write, mostly (but not exclusively) centred around Michael Myers, a kid who murdered his sister on Halloween night 1963 and ended up in a sanatarium, which he escaped exactly fifteen years later, returning to his former home of Haddonfield, Illinois to continue the killing. Over and over again, from 1978 all the way to the present day, although that does very much simplify the baffling mix of timelines and continuities between them all that I’m already regretting having committed to try and summarise! That original 1978 Halloween was written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, also director and producer respectively, and is very much inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary Psycho, as well as the slightly more obscure Canadian slasher from 1974, Black Christmas. As said, six-year old Michael murders his sister, gets locked up, escapes and returns years later to terrorise high school student Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and her babysitter friends, eventually murdering all but Laurie, who keeps him at bay long enough for his pursuing psychiatrist, Doctor Loomis, played by Donald Pleasance, to shoot him off a balcony and save her. Unfortunately, by the time he looks down from the balcony, Michael’s gone, the credits roll, and his immortal (literally!) reign of silver screen terror begins!

It’s a terrifying film to this day, in no small part thanks to Carpenter’s incredible score – supposedly created in under an hour, the simple piano melody that binds it has become as important to the series as the spray-painted, inside-out William Shatner mask Michael wears! Anyway, after being filmed in twenty days and released a few months later, on 24th October 1978, it grossed $70 million at the box office, which made it one of the most successful independent films ever, and in terms of genre heavyweights, it still sits behind only Scream and its sequel for money taken. All this made the 1981 sequel, Halloween II, an inevitability, with Carpenter and Hill returning for writing and production duties; I guess he was also tied up with The Fog or Escape From New York around then, limiting his involvement. Although it wasn’t the case at the time, we’re already at one of those splits in the timeline too but I’ll come back to that in about thirty-seven years! In the meantime, we continue precisely where the first film ended, with Laurie in hospital and Michael close behind, killing everything between him and getting at her, who it also turns out is his sister, given up for adoption as a baby. Enter Loomis, big explosion, Michael is burned to death (for the first time). It’s pretty much more of the same but with more violence and more bodies (mostly thanks to more stupidity!), and as such it’s pretty much all you could ask of a follow-up!

And then there was Halloween III: Season of the Witch! This came in 1982, with Carpenter and Hill now only involved as producers, and is a complete departure from the rest of the series, following more of a sci-fi occult vibe, as an alcoholic doctor finds himself investigating the Silver Shamrock Novelty Company, creators of a set of rubber Halloween masks implanted with a microchip containing a fragment of Stonehenge that, once activated by their ubiquitous TV advert – ensuring every kid in the country is wearing one – will kill the kids with brain damage, then unleash a swarm of insects and snakes to take out everyone around them! In reality it’s not as bonkers as it sounds, and while its inclusion as part of the series’ continuity is questionable, with Michael Myers only very briefly appearing on a TV in the background playing Halloween, when we get to choosing favourites in a bit then I’m going to put it up there! Not sure it did so well commercially though, which is why, six years later in 1988, we got Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers! Before we get to it though, I should mention a further split in the timeline that happens here, leading us to 1998’s Halloween H20 and beyond instead, which I’ll obviously also come back to.

Famous last words but I am anticipating not saying so much about most of the later entries so don’t worry too much about being here all day! Anyway, Halloween 4, no Carpenter and Hill this time but Box Office Michael Myers is back! Not quite supernatural yet, it turns out he’s been in a coma since the fire in Halloween II, waking up on one of what seems like too many ill-fated hospital transfers, when he hears that Laurie’s been killed in a car accident but has left behind a daughter. Keen to meet his niece, he heads back to Haddonfield, Loomis once again in tow, and many deaths later, ends up being shot to bits by the local posse and falling to his apparent death down a mineshaft before the obvious twist! Get over the emerging silliness and the really annoying kid, and you’ve got an enjoyably nasty trail of destruction though! Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers from 1989 begins with Michael escaping the mineshaft, getting fixed up by a nearby hermit, then returning to kill a year later, complete with a new-found psychic connection to the returning, even more annoying kid. Loomis helps the police catch him this time but it ends with him being sprung from jail by a black-booted stranger. It’s alright but there’s nothing we’ve not seen before and that was reflected in the worst box office performance of the lot. There was a six-year gap to Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, which also plays out in the movie’s timeline, and on that subject, this is the last of that original Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween 4, Halloween 5 and then this one continuity. I think!

This is where things get really stupid too – annoying kid has been held captive by black-booted stranger (who it turns out works with Loomis and runs a cult), has a baby, escapes with it, ends up shacked up with Tommy, the former little boy Laurie was babysitting in the first film, and they’re trying to protect the baby from Michael, who we learn has been cursed to kill his entire family to save the world. Or something! He ends up injected full of something nasty in his old sanitarium, where we close with Loomis screaming, the iconic mask on the floor and everything left open, just in case! We’re just about into worst of the series here, and all that occult stuff is just boring. And speaking of worst in the series… 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later resets the timeline after the big explosion at the end of Halloween II, and we learn that Laurie (played by the returning Jamie Lee Curtis) had subsequently faked her own death and has been hiding from her brother Michael ever since. Obviously, he soon finds her at the high school where she works and her son, John, is a student, then goes on the rampage and gets his head cut off. It’s generic, it wants to be Scream, and the obnoxious cast get exactly what they deserve! Following the same continuity, in Halloween: Resurrection from 2002, we learn that Laurie actually cut off someone else’s head after Micheal swapped clothes with them, she ends up in a mental home, he kills her and then everyone else (most of whom are the even more obnoxious cast and crew of a reality TV show), then ends up electrocuted but incredibly might not be dead after all. The end. Real conundrum whether this one or the last is the worst of the lot but it’s not one I care enough to consider any further here!

And likewise, moving to the 2007 Halloween remake and its 2009 sequel, while I’m a big fan of Rob Zombie, these are vulgar and unnecessary vanity projects that I’m not giving any more space to. Which brings us to our last three films, and our third main timeline… Confusingly, Halloween (2018) picks up where Halloween (1978) left off, acting as a direct sequel, where Michael was arrested at the end of the original and then locked up for forty years, when a prison transfer (of course!) goes wrong, and he heads back to Haddonfield to restart a particularly gratuitous and very enjoyable killing spree, where a slightly loopy Laurie (still played by Jamie Lee Curtis), with the help of her daughter and granddaughter, leave him burning to death in her house. Halloween Kills from 2021 starts with one of the series’ great set-pieces, involving not-really-dead Michael and the firefighters trying to get that blaze under control, while Laurie heads off to hospital, and with the exception of a bizarre mob scene there, we get back to very good business as usual, where said mob eventually gets what it deserves too! Last one then, Halloween Ends from 2022, and Micheal has a sidekick, a gone-wrong babysitter who had a kid die while he was looking after him, and is also Laurie’s granddaughter’s boyfriend! He murders loads of people, Myers-style, then Michael gets back in on the action too, Laurie does the business again, and then the whole town puts Michael’s body in an industrial shredder. The end again. And on the whole, all three of those represented a strong end (until next time) to one of my favourite movie series – authentic, respectful and full of gore! My favourite of them all, though? Well, it’s time we talked Atari 2600 game so I’ll leave that hanging for a bit longer!

You might remember Wizard Video for such VHS genre classics as Zombiethon, Return of the Zombies and, er, Zombie 2, as well as more “specialist” titles like S.S. Experiment and Miss Nude America. Actually, I guess this delightfully seedy little home video distribution company was best known for I Spit on Your Grave and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it’s the latter which brings us to their short-lived video gaming spin-off, Wizard Video Games… It was the first of two titles they released for the Atari 2600, arriving in 1983 and developed by VSS, made up of ex-staff from the failed 2600 developer Appollo, who were one of the first victims of the video game crash the same year. In the game, you take the role of the movie’s main villain, Leatherface, waving your chainsaw around and murdering trespassers while avoiding deadly obstacles, such as fences and wheelchairs! You could call it a pioneer in interactive adult entertainment, and it was certainly an early horror game, pushing the boundaries by having you play the chainsaw-wielding bad guy, but it’s also crap so I’m not sure how well it would be remembered today even if most places hadn’t refused to stock it for being too violent! That was pretty much also the case when their second game, Halloween, appeared later the same year – just in time for Halloween, in fact! If retailers didn’t refuse to stock it, it was kept under the counter like a dirty movie, leaving the writing on the wall for the company, although it’s done the value of both games no harm at all in recent years, especially the ones with white handwritten labels from when they were trying to liquidate their remaining cartridge stock right at the end! To set the scene for the game itself, let’s have a look at the instruction manual… “A homicidal maniac has escaped from a mental institution. On Halloween night, the killer returns to his home town to wreak havoc! You are babysitting for a family in a large, two story house. Somehow the vengeful murderer has gotten inside! Can you protect the children and yourself from the fury of his knife?”

It’s hard to say how “licensed” this game is. I’m not sure how the word “Halloween” stacks up on that front but I guess there was some agreement required to be able to use it together with the official artwork (as also pictured previously on my copy of the novel of the movie), as well as a plot that’s clearly lifted from the film. It’s got the most fantastic, multi-layered rendition of the theme music too, with all the right high-pitched melodies and intermittent bass tones, which doesn’t only welcome you on the title screen but comes on every time “Michael” appears… And I wouldn’t even be raising any of this if it weren’t for the fact that none of the characters in the game have a name – you’re clearly playing Laurie, and the homicidal maniac who’s escaped from a mental institution is clearly Michael Myers, but no mention of anyone’s identity anywhere. Weird. Anyway, no matter, we all know the score, and there’s no mistaking the grey jumpsuit and black boots, and what is as close to a William Shatner mask as you can get with a handful of pixels on an Atari 2600! Okay, the name of the game then, is not only to not get killed by the rampaging Michael, as I’m going to continue calling him, but to lead as many of the children you’re babysitting as possible through the sixteen rooms of the two-storey house you’re all in to various safe rooms without anyone getting stabbed. The jack-o-lanterns at the top of the screen tell you how many of your three lives are left should that happen, and at the bottom of the screen is your score. You get a strangely specific 675 points for each child you successfully deliver to one of the safe rooms, which are located at each end of each floor. Should you come across the knife that’s hidden somewhere in the house and manage to stab Michael with it, you’ll get 325 points, and if you manage to do that twice or get five children to safety, you’ll move up to the next difficulty level.

Things start out pretty manageable, with your Laurie placed on one floor of the side-on view of the house while the other floor is shown on the same screen above or below. The eight screens making up each floor flip as you travel between them, with a door to a stairway leading up and down in the safe rooms, and two other rooms with doors leading to hallways, which effectively just let you skip a couple of screens if you go into them. Apart from some very avant-garde colour choices on the walls and floors, the house you’re in is totally devoid of any character, or any real indication it’s even a house! There’s no plant pots or pictures on the wall or any other type of decoration, while the windows and doors are simply black squares and rectangles, and there’s certainly no hint of any room’s function, which I think is a missed opportunity the 2600 could have handled – just a simple representation of a kitchen or a living room or a bedroom would have really added a sense of place and at least a bit more immersion. One really cool thing that can happen when you’re on the upper floor, though, is an occasional electrical blackout, which is surprisingly effective considering it’s just making the room you’re in turn black for a second then intermittently flash on and off – if that Halloween theme music hits while you’re in total darkness then get ready to panic!

The same is true if you’re walking past a door and Michael suddenly appears out of it, and you have to wrench the joystick back the other way very sharp-ish or you’ll end up up literally running around like a headless chicken. Very harsh! Animation is almost as binary as you’d get from a type-in game at the time but what’s there works okay, with Michael’s constant stabbing motion when he appears, or the “gushing” red flashing lines indicating your head’s just been slashed off… Or even worse, one of the kids, and there’s no comic relief when that happens, as they’re left in a pile at his feet! All the same, it’s really hard today to get back into that early eighties mindset of such things being considered X-rated before their time! I guess with all that graphic violence, we can probably close on the game’s graphics – there’s really not much else going on, apart from the typically conservatively-dressed Laurie (or not) and even more simple children sprites (them being half the size of the already-simple Michael and Laurie)! I wouldn’t expect much more of any of these in a 2600 game though, with the little that’s here being recognisable and used to good effect.

Just to close on presentation and get back to gameplay, apart from that excellent music, there’s almost no sound to speak of, with just a generic footstep breaking up the silence. Which admittedly does make the onset of the dreaded chiptune piano melody even more terrifying! Playing the game generally involves searching the house for the children, which you’re effectively doing two rooms at a time, upper and lower floor, usually while using the restricted corridor-width of vertical movement to dodge Michael – run at him and move up or down just before you get there generally works if he’s coming at you, or you can just run the other way. Occasionally you will spot that huge Rambo-knife that’s been left around for the kids to play with but should you get to it before they do, a press of fire will pick it up then a thrust at Michael with another press – just as he’s about to attack with his own knife held upwards – will stab him and cause him to briefly disappear. The knife will then also disappear and end up somewhere else again. As for the children, they presumably emerge from their hiding place one at a time, and once you’ve made your way to the same room as them, a press of fire above them will work like holding their hand for as long as it’s pressed, allowing you to lead them to a safe room.

This is where things can easily go very wrong though, especially at higher levels, where Michael behaves far more aggressively (hence much higher points are in turn awarded on those). Once a child is in tow, you either run the other way or, if you’re feeling lucky, you can try a push of the up direction, which will briefly separate you and the child and allow you both to run either side of Michael. Risky business though, and more often than not you’ll end up feeling terrible as little red lines spew from that helpless little heap! However it happens though, just like in the movies, The Boogeyman’s gonna get you in the end; it’s just a matter of when… Which reminds me, they absolutely nail his impossibly slow slasher movie pace too – the ominous plod that means he should never be able to catch up with you running away at full sprint but he always does! And that’s probably just enough to keep you going with this one. The gameplay loop is as simple as the mechanics it employs, with you running back and forth across eight non-descript screens, sometimes dodging, sometimes holding down fire while you do, and then you do it again!

That tune though, and the way Michael appears from nowhere and relentlessly stalks you, is what Halloween is all about, and as such, that’s what this game does too, which is as good as a movie license (or not!) gets, especially on an Atari 2600! It’s a shame we never saw more from Wizard Video Games, and their planned soft porn classic Flesh Gordon video game adaptation, although Wizard Video did morph into Full Moon Productions, which is keeping the spirit of the straight-to-video horror movie alive to this day, with titles like Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, so you never know! The Halloween game we’ve got is perfectly fun in the meantime though, even you’ll only ever play it in very short bursts, and I reckon it’s up there among my favourite guilty gaming pleasures all the same! Speaking of which, that just leaves us with what’s going to top my list of favourite Halloween movies, and I’m going to throw in my number three first, because I have two clear favourites but even as I’m typing now, I don’t know what I’d pick as number three! I’m just going to be boring and say Halloween II because it is just more of the original, and that is my clear favourite, albeit followed very closely by Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which might be its own thing but it’s a very good thing in its own right, Michael Myers or not… Kind of like the game!

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