ULTIMATE GUIDE GHOSTBUSTERS

YOU MIGHT THINK SOMEONE TRYING TO BOLT THIS MOVIE LICENCE ONTO A CAR COMBAT GAME WOULDN'T HAVE A GHOST OF A CHANCE, BUT DAVID CRANE MADE IT WORK. WE LOOK BACK AT A GAME THAT, DESPITE THE ODDS, CAPTURED THE SPIRIT OF ITS SOURCE MATERIAL

- NICK THORPE

The great thing about Ghostbusters is that if you ask people about the film, they’ll each highlight a different iconic aspect of it. The theme tune is obviously a classic, but people might also talk about the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Slimer, the Ecto-1 car or the need not to cross the streams. For some reason though, Peter Venkman’s brilliance as a businessman rarely comes up. Despite that, David Crane’s take on Ghostbusters has strategic resource allocation at its core and has become one of the best-remembered film licences of its era.

That’s actually pretty impressive – although it was based on one of the most popular movies of its era, Ghostbusters wasn’t exactly guaranteed an easy ride with players. It’s truly amazing to think about how old some received gaming wisdom is, and suspicion of licensed games can be traced back to just a few years after they were introduced in the late-Seventies. After suffering through games like ET: The Extra Terrestrial on the Atari 2600, players quickly realised that big names can be used to sell some truly half-baked software.

The problem is that although movie licences can be commercially valuable, they often come with conditions that actively detract from the development process and Ghostbusters was definitely a great example of that. At a time when Activision would normally take nine months to make a game, the