Ghostbusters
Activision, 1984
originally played on Commodore 64
A confession: I received my first handjob playing
Ghostbusters upstairs at a family friend’s
house.
It was one of those early-life sexual encounters which has much more to
do with discovery than anything like pleasure. My family was over at a friend’s
place in the woods outside of the city, a large log cabin-style house with a
pool and a trampoline in a large lot which required a riding lawnmower that
nobody knew how to properly use. I think my mom worked with their mom at the
hospital, or something, maybe not nurses maybe a church friend. Family
friendships during childhood are always a little bit hazy. There were normal
ones, to be sure. The kind of family friends where you actually are friends
with the kids around your age. More often, however, these relationships were tense, strained
affairs, provoking a sense of acquired dread and no answer to questions about why we are
hanging around these people. My family visited this house in the woods a lot
during the summer months, as we didn’t have air conditioning at home and TV was
teaching us about global warming while selling everyone on cars and meat three times a
day. Their pool wasn’t very big but it did the trick and the kids stopped
complaining. In this case it was three kids, a girl named Heather a year older
than me, a girl a few months but a grade younger than me named Rebecca, and a
baby who I didn’t care for because it never shut up.
 |
| opening sequence singalong, with synthesized speech! |
On one of these days in the summer after the sixth grade, I was
fed up after playfighting with my brother and Rebecca in the pool so I went
upstairs to play on their computer. On the way to the house in the forest, my
parents had picked me up from swimming lessons, where a strict dress code
involving a Speedo was enforced. After nearly drowning in a fast-moving river as a five-year old, the swimming lessons were the only thing my parents ever signed me up to do. I absolutely hated that motherfucker Speedo,
for so many reasons related to me being a pre-teenager when baggy pants and baggy shorts were taking over with skateboarding and hiphop. Rebecca kept
making fun of me and smacking me in the nuts with a pool noodle. Smart as I and
most guys are at such times in our lives, I misread as teasing what she was
trying to do and left the pool, offended. I had thought that Heather was
already upstairs playing, because she wasn’t in the pool. I couldn’t find her,
so I decided to game anyway. A box for
Ghostbusters
was laying on the floor and my family had seen the film that week on cheap
Tuesday, so there was no decision about it really.
 |
| don't cross the streams! |
I’m not sure how much people who weren’t there will appreciate
just how big the
Ghostbusters
phenomenon was in the mid 1980s. Like most kids my age, I dressed like a
Ghostbuster for Halloween,
collected the stickers, and
watched the cartoon on
Saturday mornings. Ads for
Ghostbusters products were everywhere, so
a videogame adaptation was inevitable. A decade into the twenty-first century, we’re now long
accustomed to commercial franchise culture, with seemingly every entertainment
property being not simply a book or movie or game but also multiple toy and
product lines and phone apps and fast food tie-ins and themed credit cards and
everymotherfuckinggoddamnthing else that an idea can be printed on and
exploited. We’re now totally bored by the cultural excesses of capitalism,
which has rendered even novelty obsolete. Getting swarmed by the cultural
artifacts of a single entertainment franchise was a relatively new thing back
in 1984, a year not so far away from the
Star
Wars (1977) blockbuster film phenomenon of the late 1970s and early 1980s which
started the whole franchise thing in the first place. Back then it seemed like
a really cool idea to have ideas from a movie spread to every conceivable
consumer product. It made the movie feel more tangible, something manifest not
just as a construct of the collective or singular imagination but also in the
material world. For many reasons, this industrial articulation has since come
to the fore in the entertainment industry, arguably signalling the positioning
of blockbuster entertainment products at the forefront of finance capital.
Indeed, the blockbuster film is the court mask worn by capital as it seeks to
distract and contain its subjects, false kings and queens entitled by their own pleasure.
 |
| catching ghosts with a vacuum strapped to the hood of Ecto-1 |
Ghostbusters the
videogame is itself a bit of a show. The
opening sequence features synthesized
voice and music from
Ray Parker Jr’s hit theme song. Prefiguring the popularity
of karaoke in North America, a bouncing ball jumps around song lyrics as
players are supposed to sing them. Needless to say, this feature was quite
popular at school, as even the teacher requested its performance during music
portions of the class. There we were, shitty plastic recorders in hand, trying
to learn the teacher’s transcription of the Commodore 64 version of the
Ghostbusters theme song while wondering
why we weren’t just playing the game while letting the computer sing. Sublime transcendence.
More than anything else,
Ghostbusters
teaches players the value of a dollar. As a small business owner – a symbol
of Reagan’s trickle-down America satirically exploited in both film and game – players manage the business side of the Ghostbusters operation as well as engage in
actual ghost busting. Clients pay handsomely for services, but the
expenses of professional paranormal containment quickly escalate. While played
somewhat for laughs, players will have to upgrade the Ghostbuster car and
outfit it with the latest in ghost detection and ...ah... busting equipment.
 |
| the expenses of busting ghosts, aka small business 101 |
Exceptionally
simplistic in retrospect,
gameplay involves driving around the city catching
ghosts from the streets of New York with the vacuum on the hood of Ecto-1 or
using foot traps and proton packs when buildings become haunted. I was always fascinated by the driving sequences, not because they were fun but because there was a slight psychedelic effect with the Ghostbusters logo on the roof of Ecto-1 which caused it to lag behind the movement of the vehicle. Obviously a programming error, this lag suggested to the young me that the logo was itself haunted by a ghost, much like it was in the cartoon. Little changes
until the endgame, when the Ghostbusters have to survive the Staypuft Marshmallow
Man and defeat Gozer on the roof of the skyscraper, much like they do in the
film. Except there’s no Gozer and the endgame plays automatically once players skip
past the Marshmallow Man’s legs. All very anticlimactic, really.
 |
| driving around looking for strategy elements |
Heather’s not up here,
Rebecca said coming into the room and sitting down beside me. I didn’t look
away from the screen because I was trying to get past Staypuft and into the
skyscraper. With absolutely no warning whatsoever Rebecca moved my towel and put
her hand in my lap and squeezed really hard like she was seeing if it would break. I was frozen in place.
So how big is it when
you get a boner?
 |
| climactic endgame with the Staypuft Marshmallow Man |
It was a strange feeling: Rebecca squeezing my penis as the
Staypuft Marshmallow man jumps around onscreen and I have to get through
his legs. Even when she took it out of my Speedo and stood it up in her hand I didn’t stop playing immediately. After playing for twenty-five minutes I had collected more money than I ever had before,
and my car was fully upgraded. This was the closest I had ever been to the end of the game and I wanted to see it happen. In the end she won of course. Only one of my
Ghostbusters made it past Staypuft before Rebecca asked
Is this what to do? and I stopped paying attention to the game. We went back to the house a few more times that summer, but nothing like that ever happened between Rebecca and I again, even when we played other games alone upstairs. The last I’d heard anything about her, she had married a teacher and worked in real estate.
