A Nightmare On Elm St. | NES | LJN | 1990

This one’s a classic example of ‘Get the license because it’s a big movie, worry about whether it’ll work as a game later.’ You’ve got an IP in which the most charismatic character it a disfigured undead child-killer with a hand full of blades and a boiler room full of corpses. You’ve got a bunch of instantly forgettable heroes, - Bar that Depp guy. He could do well. Keep an eye on him - most of whome exist only to get killed in spectacular ways. You’ve got a movie with only one potential enemy, who incidentally happens to be the coolest character in the entire thing, plus epic amounts of gore, a bunch of teenage sex, and you’ve got to fit it all onto an 8-bit console in an era when gaming is still mainly a kids’ occupation. Good luck. Yoooooouu’ll need it!

Properly adapting A Nightmare On Elm St. in a way which kept faithful to what fans loved about the movie could only have been done by creating an ultra-violent slash ‘em up in which gamers got to control a wise-cracking Freddy as he hacked the living shit - and any other bodily juices - out of a collection of dumb-ass teenagers across a series of surreal nightmare landscapes. That would have sold about four copies in the NES era though, and had LJN branded as the most dangerous and depraved thing since New Kids On The Block. Provided they'd even been able to pull it off on the available technology of course.

So they didn’t bother properly adapting it. Instead they made a bland platformer with a bland lead character trying to stop the clawed one (Boo!) by collecting his bones (Read: coin substitutes), sorted out the baddie problem by populating it with a veritable zoo of non-scary moving Hallowe’en decorations (Because, you know, it’s a horror game, it needs skeletons and bats), and had Freddy pop up occasionally as a lamer-than-a-no-legged-donkey boss.

About as scary and atmospheric as a roast potato.