Let's Play... Ghostbusters

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.