Ghostbusters, After a While

The first computer I had was a Tandy 1000. While it didn't have Internet access, couldn't stream movies or burn CDs and didn't allow me to taunt a childhood friend several states away about the Mandarin plot twist in “Iron Man 3,” it served me well for many years, longer than any of its higher-tech successors.

My mom bought it for me in second grade, and I was still using it well into high school. That's when I started revisiting some of the games I'd gotten early on, to see if I could make it beyond the levels where I'd previously stalled. Or maybe I was just approaching the extent of my gaming abilities on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis.

One of these returns was to the Ghostbusters game released in 1985, the year after my mom had to take me out of the theater because I got too scared as the terror dog chased Rick Moranis. I eventually watched the entire movie, many times.

It was a few years later when I got the game, which allowed you to start your own Ghostbusters franchise and outfit it with a choice of four cars and various ghost-busting equipment, including a vacuum to suck up free-roaming vapors as you drove around town. Coincidentally, the city where you hung your Ghostbusters shingle just happened to be experiencing a lot of haunting, complete with a Gatekeeper, Keymaster and the occasional Marshmallow Man.

The game opened with a terrific 8-bit version of the “Ghostbusters” theme. The gameplay was pretty repetitive, with the main difference being the choice of four or five buildings as backgrounds when you showed up to manhandle a manifestation. You did this by positioning two 8-bit Ghostbusters and catching the little blob between their proton pack streams, maneuvering it over a trap. Crossing the streams caused your packs to short out and the ghost to escape, because, of course, you should never cross the streams until the most dramatically appropriate moment.

I assumed that would come when the city's PK meter maxed out at 9999 and you had to go face off against Gozer (the Gozerian). But first, you had to sneak two of your three Ghostbusters past the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, standing sentry at the entrance to the high rise.

Well, he wasn't standing so much as dancing back and forth, hopping from one foot to the other. No firing the proton backs at this guy; you had to run into the door before one of those massive white feet slammed down on your hapless paranormal investigator and sent his twisted form sliding away.

I got one guy in plenty of times, but the second man never made it, and there was no Winston Zeddemore waiting in my hearse (or VW bug or station wagon or high-performance sports car).

But later – older, wiser, able to make significant progress on Super Mario Bros. 3 even without the help of a Game Genie – I decided to try it again.

I'm not sure how many times I ran it back, but finally, one day, I did it. Years of frustration melted away, and I steeled myself to finally take on the next challenge.

Only there wasn't one.

Get past the Marshmallow Man and you're rewarded with an animation of that sanctioned stream crossing and then, I don't know, maybe a congratulatory message?

Nevertheless, my Tandy edition Ghostbusters entertained me for many hours, and was one of the earliest examples of customizing a game, something I enjoy quite a bit (sometimes more than the actual gameplay). But all those years of anticipation created a buildup that simply slipping one more guy past the dancing Marshmallow Man didn't quite pay off.

I can't blame the designers. They probably figured everyone would have beaten it years earlier.

(Pictures with this post are primarily of the Commodore 64 version of the game, taken from c64-wiki.com and pixelatedarcade.com. Box art comes from ghostbusters.fandom.com.)

Check out a play-through video of the Commodore 64 edition here.