All right, kids. Gather around. I have a story to tell. Back in the eighties, there was this console called the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a breakthrough gaming device that spawned a lot of experimental video games. Some of them, like the Legend of Zelda, introduced revolutionary concepts. Others, like Deadly Towers, made people blow themselves up while standing in large crowds.

Now…if I know reality…which I don’t…there’s always a chance you could get sucked into a time vortex and whisked back to the 1980s. Should this ever occur, you’ll have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create your very own shitty NES game. Everybody did it at the time. It was as popular as breathing…or Duran Duran. Let’s start with the basics:

Creating A Game Based On A Movie

Behold the instruments of Armageddon.

Saying that a video game based on a movie is going to suck is like saying oil prices will continue to rise. I can still remember some of the worst movie-based video games to hit the NES. There was Friday the 13th, where vaguely humanoid-looking things run from other vaguely-looking humanoid things until a bunch of children get axed to death. There was also Home Alone, in which you must flee from two robbers until your brain forces your heart to stop beating. Oh, and who can forget Jaws, the single most scarring event of my childhood since that scary man pulled me into his car outside the school. So yeah…this seems like a good place to start.

Begin by picking a half-decent movie. Hell, pick any movie. The game doesn’t actually need anything to do with it. Usually, slapping the movie’s title onto the box is good enough. So go ahead, turn “The Breakfast Club” into a top-down spaceship shooter. Or turn “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” into a WW2 submarine simulator. Or how about turning “This Is Spinal Tap” into some sort of vaguely erotic ninja platformer? The choices are endless. As a developer, the movie industry is putty in your hands, so take your pick.

Once you’ve chosen what game you’ll make, you need to move on to the technical stuff.

Graphics

Sure, you COULD make a car look like a car, or a fireball look like a fireball. But why not make the car look like a fireball and the fireball look like a walrus? It’s worked before. Ever played X-Men? Do you have any idea what that blob is that you control? No. Can you still play the game if you forced yourself to? My point exactly.

So ugly it could kill a cat

Also, make sure your graphics flash in a rapid fashion. Developers from the 80s, like their present-day descendents, the Angelfire webmasters, thought it was “bodacious” and “jiggy” to dish out seizures to every person who makes eye contact with the screen. Your game should also uphold these rigorous standards of visual woe!

Play Control

Of course, even if the graphics look as though a sewage pipe burst inside a morgue, a game is still salvageable if it has decent play control. So it’s your duty to see that this doesn’t happen. See the A button? You don’t need it. See the B button? Keep it, but make the response time roughly 5 seconds before it does anything. Also, feel free to reverse the directional pad so that “up” goes down and “down” goes up. Usually this is only done in pilot simulators, but you don’t need such an excuse. After all, you’re a low-grade third-party NES developer. Pause is also a nice feature to have. Nice, but not necessary. Chuck it and make the Start button eject the cartridge across the room instead. All of this will be your play “control”. If you’re successful, anyone who plays your game for more than 5 minutes will feel the irrepressible urge to hijack a blimp and crash it during the Super Bowl.

Should be about this awkward

Save Files

These make is easier to continue your game. This is especially useful if your game is long. Unfortunately, this technology doesn’t exist before 1986 or so. Even if you time-travel in after that time, I still wouldn’t recommend using save files. It would require knowledge of things such as “input”, “output”, and “consumer satisfaction”. This is knowledge you probably don’t have.

Storyline

HAHAHA! What?

Wait, that’s not entirely accurate. You SHOULD have a storyline, but it should fall into one of the following categories.

1) Eerily Brief: Something like “find magic crystal” or “save princess/girlfriend now” will do nicely. You don’t need to go into specifics, such as why you need the crystal, or how the bitch got caught. Just a few words to get people scratching their heads, and hopefully keep playing in order to find the answers to these questions. Naturally, they won’t find anything. That’s life, suckers!

2) Confusing: Something like “destroy evil koala” or “collect 10 tomatoes to advance”. If you’re really good, players might actually look inside their cartridges for traces of cocaine dust.

3) A Mosaic of Random Pictures: A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. So several pictures must be worth several thousand words, if my arithmetic is correct. Some games, like “Heroes of the Lance”, will begin by flashing pictures of elves across the screen. There is no text. There is no explanation. Just pictures.

Sound Effects

High-pitched beeps will serve you quite well.

People originally thought sound is made of waves. It's actually made of pain.

“But Chris,” you’re probably saying, “how do I know if the beeps are high-pitched enough?”

When windows start breaking and birds lose their sense of direction and start careening into buildings and windshields, you’ll know that the decibel level is appropriate.

“Thank you, Chris.”

Anytime.

Music

Take four notes and turn them into an endless loop. This will actually serve as your game’s musical score. Yeah. You think I’m being sarcastic again. Well I have news for you: I’m not! “Heroes of the Lance” once again springs to mind as an example of what happens when you hire half-deaf White Snake groupies to compose your “music”. The result is random blips and beeps that could have come from medical equipment. The worst part is when the music gives you a stroke, and you’re forced to listen to it in the hospital all over again.

Heroes of the Lance. Note the dead bodies scattered everywhere. I envy them.

Ending

Don’t bother making an ending for your game (assuming it’s possible to win). Anyone masochistic enough to play through to the finish doesn’t deserve to see an ending. But if you really, really want one, write the dialogue in English and then mail it to Japan for translation. When it comes back, switch random words around before inserting it into the final product. Example

“Congratulations on your winning. Pressing start for new game unlock level secrets. Thank for playing.”

Ideally, the cartridge should explode into a cloud of mustard gas if the person presses Start. Now THAT’S the Nintendo I remember!

Wow. I didn’t think I could pack in so many references to the eighties at once. But there you go. Anyway…in its ten-year run, the NES produced tons of hits that kept gamers satisfied for years. However, we must never forget the casualties of lazy, inept developers who are contented to produce shitty products or ride off of the success of brand names and popular movies. And while you’re busy time-traveling, kill Sinbad before he has the chance to start acting.