In the UK, even the original title was problematic enough, so the …Ate My Neighbors bit was ditched and all we ended up with was Zombies: an admittedly lean, mean title, but totally lacking the humour of its original. Right from the off, there were concerns about the game’s content, and precautions were enforced to ensure that the fragile minds of children were not forever corrupted. But unlike the terrifying games that followed, Zombies was all about having harmless fun.
Zombies ate my neighbors passwords sega movie#
Yet the clincher as that Zombies Ate My Neighbors felt as close to being in an interactive horror movie as was possible. The prospect of 55 “un-deadly” levels (!!!) was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before – I really felt like I was getting my money’s worth. In fact, if Zombies had a cultural equivalent that decade, it was probably something like The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror, where the splatter was delivered with a gleefully knowing wink – half scary, half delirious with amusement. It played out like a loving, gleefully garish tribute to film and comic books – more Creepshow and Piranha than The Exorcist. It wasn’t based on a specific film, but it was drenched in the atmosphere and spookiness of both horror and sci-fi. Zombies Ate My Neighbors was a total breath of fresh air. It looked great – especially the SNES version, with the slimy green colour banner – but it was nothing on the US edition.
Unfortunately, in the UK, this inventive approach was replaced with a cuter, admittedly more visually appropriate illustrated alternative, featuring the two main characters bouncing up into the air from a trampoline, with the title characters standing on the ground behind. It stood out and immediately told you what you were in for: scares, but with a twist of humour. Think The Blob, Them! or Plan 9 From Outer Space, with monochrome scream queens screaming in terror while undead ghouls lurked in the background. It was a startling change from the animated genre games of the era, and parodied the B-movies of the 50s. The original artwork for Zombies Ate My Neighbors in the US – which I was aware of, probably through magazines like Total! or Sega Power – was something I didn’t initially appreciate. Zombies was unapologetically, wonderfully geeky. I remember thinking that this game looked like teenage gaming, if not adult gaming, and was an exciting step forward from the more wholesome likes of Mario or the “cool for kidz” hipness of Sonic. Simply known as Zombies here in the UK for censorship reasons, Zombies Ate My Neighbors was one of those dream titles that if it hadn’t been invented, horror geeks of the time would’ve been dreaming it would be created. Nothing with an 18 certificate, anyway.īecause of this, no games really scared me when I was little – so when Zombies Ate My Neighbors was announced, I was immediately curious. If these had been films, they’d have been Hammer movies – ghoulish for sure, both very much comfortably rooted in the 60s and 70s. The only games close to horror that I played were ones with both feet firmly planted in the past: Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts and Castlevania. Weirdly, this didn’t stop games based on adult films being made you had harmless tie-ins for RoboCop and Death Wish 3, while there were horror games too, like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which were meant to be rubbish. In the pre-32 bit era, games weren’t certified, so they were simply considered suitable for all. Yet when I was young, there wasn’t much in the way of horror games.
Zombies ate my neighbors passwords sega full#
The 80s and early 90s, with video-shop culture in full swing, were a fascinating time for horror-movie awareness what was once terrifying and unwatchable became something addictive. However, I was one of the last to do so on my road: neighbourhood kids even younger than me were boasting about watching A Nightmare on Elm Street (we’re talking six-year-old children, here!). You knew you were too young to see them, but this made them all the more seductive and appealing.Įven me, a late arrival to the horror genre, saw these movies way before I was legally allowed to. Unless your family was like the Flanders in The Simpsons – with dozens of channels locked-out to protect the young ones – the odds were that you illicitly watched a “15” or even an “18”-certificate film long before you were legally allowed to.
Ah, horror movies: that classic cultural rite-of-passage.
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