September 19, 2006:
Horror is huge in today's video game market -- it's certainly much bigger than it's ever been before. Of all the emotions video games try to draw from players, "being scared" has benefited enormously from the industry's advances. The massive improvements in graphics, motion and sound have made today's horror games capable of actually frightening a person. This wasn't always so, of course, and the further you go back in video gaming history, the fewer horror-related games you'll find. Some were okay, but most just plainly didn't work...to the point where would-be competing developers didn't bother trying.
Because of their relative rarity, even the suckiest of the sucky horror games from consoles past maintain some level of appeal. They just feel so different. The Atari 2600 had its share of spooky games, and they've generally fallen on the "more sought" side on the collectors' market. The most effective examples forced us to rely mostly on our imagination and sense of dread; the least effective tried to make blocky pixels look scary when it was clearly impossible for blocky pixels to look anything but cute. The game I'm about to spend a few hours writing about falls somewhere in the middle.
Made by Data Age in 1983, Frankenstein's Monster wasn't popular by any stretch. Some have attributed this to the era's video game crash; I think it was more just a case of a game with too small of a core clientele. Face facts: It's the best time of year to be into Frankenstein, and I still had to pull your teeth to get this article read. Being well-known doesn't necessarily correlate with people going ape shit over something, and not very many people were going ape shit for Frankenstein. That's why he was always moaning.
Frankenstein's Monster wasn't a great game, but it had enough nuances to make players only realize that halfway. Upon hearing the title, many would assume one of two things: Either the players portrayed Frankenstein's Monster, or they fought him as some kind of boss character late in the game on a level that's impossible to get to. Neither assumptions are true. What Frankenstein's Monster has going for it is its copious amounts of Frankenstein's Monster sightings. He's with you every step of the way, and not because you're portraying him. No, this was a chance to scratch away the creature's once-prevalent sympathy card, and either kill or be killed by it. Finally, an evil Frankenstein's Monster!
Before we get to the actual levels, it's important to understand just what you're up against. Meet the enemies...
Note that the biggest enemy in the game isn't pictured above: Water. Falling into little lakes is pretty much the only way to lose in Frankenstein's Monster, but I hope you don't take that to mean that the game's a cinch, because falling into little lakes is the hero's specialty. The actual enemies in the game don't kill you; they're mostly there to slow your progress, since you're working against a time limit. When the hero gets hit, he just kinda stands still for a few seconds and gets over it. More dangerous are the enemies who just happen to be situated in the perfect spot to knock you into a death lake.
1.- BATS! Bats cannot hurt the hero, but they can bumrush your character and push him away from his target area, killing time, and in turn, ultimately killing you. It took me five games and three Google searches to come to the conclusion that these were indeed bats.
2.- GHOSTS! I like the ghosts. They look like ghosts, and since they're blue, they look like Pac-Man ghosts after he chugs a happy pill. The ghosts are slow-moving and easy enough to circumvent (despite their ability to float weightlessly, the ghosts cannot move upward when you jump over them), serving more to remind players that they're not allowed to stop and smell the roses when they're all up in Dr. F's hizzy fo shizzy. Keep moving, or yer gonna get ghosted.
3.- FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER! Hells yeah, it's the big man. Players don't directly associate with Frankenstein's Monster during gameplay, but your main objective is to beat the timer and keep him dead. If you fail, he comes alive and makes you dead instead. Tit for tat. Frank's bolts are easily misinterpreted as cheeks, but at least he had the good sense to keep his arms pointed downward in fear of anyone confusing his body with a swastika.
4.- SPIDERS! These guys are just weird. They fall from the ceilings on extremely thick webs, and if nobody's there to land on, they vanish. The spiders are also piss poor at the whole web business, being unable to actually affix their web strands to the ceiling. The whole damned thing falls, web and all. I consider them the toughest of the everyday enemies, but that's probably because they're the only ones smart enough to chill out near the death lakes and greatly increase the likelihood of being credited with our deaths.
5.- GIANT TARANTULAS! More spiders! This time, it's a bunch of free-roaming giant tarantulas who pose nearly no threat but still manage to fuck my shit up because they're tarantulas as big as the character I'm navigating.
And what about the hero? He was never given a proper name as far as I know, but he doesn't need one, because he wears a baseball cap and that's identity enough. The hero's goal is to creep around Dr. Frankenstein's castle dungeon and secretly erect walls around the monster that will, I suppose, preclude Dr. Frankenstein from finishing his deadly creation. Seriously, that's what you're doing: You're building walls around the villain's weapon so he can't get to it. We could only consider this a sound strategy if today was Crazy Day and "sound" actually meant "fucking stupid."
What you see above accounts for almost the whole game. It's three parts Pitfall! and one part Frogger, with the hero needing to hustle his way down three floors of terror before swiping a stone and making his way up again. (More on the stones in a minute.) You'll notice the many pits littering the stage. The ones with little specs underneath them are safe to visit. The specs serve as ropes, allowing the hero to climb up and down floors. If there's no speck, it's all heck: Your hero will fall helplessly, and if there's no solid foundation to catch him on the levels below, he'll land in a lake and die. Luckily, he's allowed to do that three times before the video game gods make him stop.
You're probably wondering why Frankenstein's Monster is white. Aloud. You're that curious. At the start of the game, the creature isn't alive. He needs time to grow whatever it is that makes him alive. The hero has reason to rush, because after every little stretch of adventuring, Frankenstein's Monster will get some lightning to the face, grow a little greener and come ever closer to eating your arms off.
Even when you're trying to on purpose, it's tough to run out of time. Dr. Frankenstein prefers the slow and steady approach, which screws up his Atari win/loss record but ideally would make for a stronger monster in the long run. You have to really suck to run out of time, at least on the earlier stages. Can't speak for the later and more difficult levels, because the death lakes prohibit me from getting to them. I'm hating on water tonight.
What the monster does when it finally goes green is another thing entirely, and while I'm not up to that part yet, I'll tell you this: It is the single greatest thing you will ever see.
The layout of the stages varies a bit between levels, but the goal remains the same: Climb down, fetch rock, carry rock upstairs. If the hero is fortunate enough to reach a stone, it will dissapear, presumably transformed into something more pocket-sized by magic. Even if you can't see it, know that once touched, the stone is on his person at all times.
Getting back upstairs is a lot tougher than going down. It takes precise jumps in a game that does not allow for precise jumping, and the kind of luck that would preclude one from playing an old Atari game, because if you had that much luck, you'd be doing bigger and better things than playing old Atari games.
After carrying the stone all the way up, the hero must drop the stone near the creature's lifeless body. Dropping the stone near Frankie is a cinch. More troubling is the Kessel Run you'll have to do to reach him...
The second (and only other, I think) stage in the game features the hero running his hat-wearing ass up a big, black, bat-filled room. His mission: Get all the way up to Frankie and drop his rocky load, and I mean that in the most saccharine way possible. You should be able to do this without a problem, but it will take time, because there's ten trillion bats and every one of them is capable of pushing your character back to the start gate. They come out so fast and with such volume that any semblence of strategy or finesse can be thrown out the window -- you just mash the hero up, left and right without really paying attention and hope for the best.
After adding to Frank's rock collection, the stages repeat, albeit it with reorganized pits, lakes and enemies. You go back to the dungeon and find more stones, and then you go to the Batcave and do more mindless running. Do it six times, and you win. Frankenstein's Monster will be completely barricaded and no longer a menace. Fail, and you're fucked. He'll gather enough energy to come alive and perform...Tha Monsta Stomp.
Tha Monsta Stomp is awesome. You get to see it every time you lose the game, meaning that you get to see it every time you play the game. After a time limit loss or three death lake drops, Frankenstein's Monster stands up and jiggles his feet your way in what's meant to appear kind of 3D but looks more like Frankenstein's Monster is growing to enormous sizes at an alarming rate.
At the climax of Tha Monsta Stomp, Frankenstein's Monster is now so close to eating you that you can't see anything but his body. To illustrate this, the final shot in the "game over" sequence is...well...
It's hard to tell exactly what's happening here, but the big finale is a screen that flashes light green and dark green. I guess it's meant to represent a Frankenstein's Monster attack. Frank's attacks look an awful lot like the warning message on a radar screen in a bad movie. Either Frankenstein's Monster is killing me, or the submarine is losing buoyancy and fast.
There were better and more famous "scary games" for the Atari 2600, but Frankenstein's Monster was the only one that ended with an Earth Day disco. Considering the limitations of its time, it's a pretty playable little ditty with a concept fun enough to compensate for whatever tries to junk it up.
I wonder what happens if a player actually beats the game. Maybe we get a shot of the hero holding a money bag with a synthesized "MY MONSTER CANNOT DO HIS MONSTA STOMP" coming from the unseen distance. That'd rule.
And what about the hero? He was never given a proper name as far as I know, but he doesn't need one, because he wears a baseball cap and that's identity enough. The hero's goal is to creep around Dr. Frankenstein's castle dungeon and secretly erect walls around the monster that will, I suppose, preclude Dr. Frankenstein from finishing his deadly creation. Seriously, that's what you're doing: You're building walls around the villain's weapon so he can't get to it. We could only consider this a sound strategy if today was Crazy Day and "sound" actually meant "fucking stupid."
