The Cars Of Ghostbusters (The ’80s Game)

Who’s up for nostalgia? Or, if you’re not as tragically old as I am, a little foray into some ancient car/computer history? You are, that’s who! For the usual unknowable reasons, I was thinking about the old Ghostbusters video game, which came out the same year as the movie, 1984. Activision made the game, and like many of these games made for wildly popular movies, they wanted to maximize profits, so they ported the game to as many computers and consoles of the era as they could.  The game featured (usually) four kinds of cars, so let’s look at those cars.

Back in the day, things were far less standardized than they are now. There were many popular types of computers, and all were incompatible with each other, and all had pretty wildly diverging capabilities and limitations when it came to graphics and sound. It’s these differences and limitations that I find so fascinating; I love seeing how the designers and programmers worked around the often significant limitations of the various machines to get the results they wanted, or at least as close as they could manage.

The game itself was pretty involved, and roughly followed the plot of the movie. You controlled the Ghostbusters, and you did things like pick a vehicle (the movie’s Ectomobile, a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel ambulance conversion does appear, but there are others, which we’ll get to) and buy equipment, then roam around the city busting ghosts until you have a final showdown with Zuul/giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Here’s a longplay video of the Commodore 64 version, if you’re curious:

You know, while we’re on the subject, here’s something I never really understood. In the movie, there was, of course, this final battle between Zuul, a minion of the god Gozer, who was a demigod worshiped by the Sumerians, Mesopotamians and Hittites around 6000 BCE, at least according to history as told in the movie. This all happened atop a skyscraper in NYC, and was witnessed firsthand by thousands, I’d imagine.

So, eventually, the Ghostbusters are triumphant, but a huge number of people saw firsthand the power of the god Gozer. So why didn’t those people decide to convert to be Gozerians? I mean, they got so much more direct evidence of the existence of Gozer than anyone has ever gotten of any of the dieties of other major religions, at least in modern times. I’d just have thought that some population might have been convinced to follow Gozer after such a spectacle.

Of course, he was defeated by Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd et al, so maybe that kinda hurt recruitment?

Anyway, back to the game, and the cars. As I mentioned, you could pick from four cars in the game, ranging from small and cheap to big and expensive. The cheaper cars were slower and couldn’t hold as much equipment, so you had to pick wisely based on your budget. The cars were described as a compact, the movie’s Ecto-1, a sort of more generic station wagon, and a sports car. Let’s look at how these were portrayed, and see if we can identify the real cars they were based on!

First, let’s look at the Apple II version:

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

I’m partial to the Apple II because I had one as a kid and still have one now, which I use to make custom Autopian Member Birthday robots and cars. I’ve gone into detail about the quirkiness of Apple II graphics before, but those quirks are used well here.

The compact is clearly a Volkswagen Beetle, which I find very pleasing, and when I played this game I’d almost always choose the Beetle even though it was the smallest option. Telling the year of this Beetle is tricky on a screen with 280×192 resolution, but I think it’s a ’68 or ’69, if I’m reading the vents at the rear as just the strip under the rear window and not extra ones on the engine lid.

Next we have the Ecto-1, pretty well (if cartoonishly-proportioned) rendered, and clearly that famous Caddy. The purple station wagon doesn’t seem to be based on a real car, but based on the side windows, I think it may be a shooting brake?

The sports car, in a bold orange, has either T-tops or gullwing doors; I can’t quite tell. There appear to be pop-up headamps, and those could be engine vents at the rear, suggesting a mid-engine car? Looks like a nice domed rear window, too. It sort of feels like a magical Lotus/Trans-Am love child.

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

The Commodore 64 version is quite similar to the Apple II version, which is also quite similar to the Atari 8-bit computer version:

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

There’s differences in colors, but the basic designs are pretty much the same for all three of these. Each computer had its own unique restrictions on colors, and while all managed to deal with those pretty well, I’d have liked to have seen some attempt to make the Beetle’s taillights red. Oh well.

Things get a bit different with some other versions; look at the MSX (an interesting Microsoft-started standard that was big in Japan but not really in the US) version:

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

The cars are a bit more abstracted here, with greater resolution and some detail that somehow, confusingly, manages to make cars that look worse than the lower-resolution versions we saw above. The Beetle is weirdly drawn, too angular, and the headlights reduced to small black blocks (though I’m glad the fender-top turn indicators are still around).

The Ecto-1 isn’t too bad, the station wagon loses some detail and charm, getting very genericized, but the sports car does get a lot more window detailing, which doesn’t really help to identify the car. It also now sports a very tapered hood!

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

The Sinclair Spectrum (a popular British computer – Adrian says he has one for me!) also has some pretty high-resolution cars, at the expense of color, which was all part of the unusual way Spectrums handled color, which was only two per 8×8 block of pixels.

The Beetle is a bit hard to see in that teal-on-gray, bit it looks mostly similar to the Apple/C64/Atari ones, but it gets a bit weird at the front. The Ecto-1, as usual, is pretty recognizable, but here the station wagon differs a lot. I kinda like it more, as it seems to have a bit more going on, style-wise.

The sports car here gets sort of awkward T-Tops, almost like Tetris pieces, and what may be a wing with the vents.

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

The Sega Master System had a lot more colors to play with than most of the other systems, but again we see that better capabilities don’t always yield better results. All the cars here feel somehow more generic, especially the compact one, which is no longer a Beetle and is now some little sedan. Maybe like a Tercel? Corolla?

The Ecto-1 looks less like the original Caddy, being a bit too slab-sided here. The station wagon is not really a wagon now, more of a yellow sedan, but does have an exciting hood shape and big, round hood ornament. It sort of reminds me of a ’70s Ford LTD.

The sports car feels kind of Porsche 911-like here, especially in the front end, but the back feels like something else entirely.

(screenshot composite: Activision/emulator/FRGCB)

Finally, let’s look at the Atari 2600 version. This one only has one car, the Ecto-1, and the Atari has by far the most restrictive limitations, graphically. I really respect what David Crane and Dan Kitchen managed to do inside of these limitations, especially for making a moving visual object this big.

I’m not exactly sure how they pulled this off, but I think it’s a combination of clever uses of the 8-pixel-wide player sprite, changing size and pixel patterns, and using the simple missile sprite to fill in the left side. One little advantage 2600 graphics had was that the machine was capable of displaying an impressive 128 colors, but only four per scanline. So if you wanted a multicolored sprite, it would be in horizontal stripes, usually. You can see how they used this to give the taillights some depth and detail! Atari 2600 graphics are deeply and fascinatingly weird!

Man, this was geeky.