Two things made that possible. The first was the changing nature of the videogame development process in 1984, pioneered partly by companies, like Activision itself, which were starting to take game design seriously. “In the early days of videogames, the designer did everything: the concept, the art, the programming, the sound effects development. But by the time I was programming Ghostbusters, larger game design teams had developed.

The art for the Ghostbusters game was developed by Hilary Mills, the sound effects and music were developed by Russell Lieblich and the intro sequence was done by Activision’s East Coast team of Garry Kitchen, Dan Kitchen and Alex DeMeo. The Ghostbusters game was a team effort.”

But a team wasn’t enough on its own – it also required a head start. Happily, at the time the licence came his way, Crane had been hard at work on a game called Car Wars. It was this title that would help Crane crystallise the unusual design concept for Ghostbusters.

“In Car Wars you customised a car with weapons that you would use while driving around the city. Sound at all familiar?” says Crane. “There was no hope of finishing a new game in time without using work already in progress, so I had to tie the driving sequence to the Ghostbusters concept. And what better way than to change the weaponry on the car to ghost-catching tools? Of course, at no point in the film do the actors drive through the city vacuuming up ghosts, but why not? Let’s add a ‘ghost vacuum’ to the car and suck up wandering ghosts.”

moscallout “The best strategy is to design an original game that will stand alone even without the licence.” /moscallout
With Car Wars as the basis, the other pieces started to fall into place. From a map screen, the Ghostbusters would be dispatched to jobs around New York, catching the ghosts both en route in the car and at various locations on foot: the business sim was born. It was an ambitious number of features to cram into such a small timeframe. “As we worked on the game, it became clear that the movie was going to be a big hit, so everybody worked extra hard on making it happen,” explains Crane. But the technology still imposed severe limitations. “On all of the early game systems, half of the programmer’s time was spent making the game system display your game. We were still developing the tools for the C64, including making custom compression algorithms to try to fit as much as possible in the game.” It was such limitations that would lead to Crane’s only real regret about the title: “I was generally pretty pleased with the game, but I have to admit that I had hoped to make a better victory sequence. You eventually cross the streams to close the dimensional portal: that was the goal of the entire game. Sadly, when you do so there is only a small animation of a closing door. Big deal!”

Such disappointments aside, the game was successfully completed in time for the film’s release, and provided a perfect complement to the movie, exploring the film’s possibility space without simply restating  the plot. And although its ambitious features and blend of genres meant it had the potential to confuse audiences, Ghostbusters went on to be Activision’s most ported game.

“We used to joke that it would end up getting ported to digital watches before its popularity faded,” remembers Crane. He had already moved to better quarters on campus by the time the game was released, and wasn’t available to work on the many translations, which may explain their patchy nature.

While most stick to his basic template, elements come and go: the Sega Master System version adds an on-foot shooting gallery section inside Spook Central, but ditches the graceful animations of the original, and the NES version features a totally different endgame, but has graphics so primitive it becomes hard to follow most of what’s going on.

Crane puts the finished game’s success down to understanding the limitations of games, and specifically the way they differ from films. “The game itself was not a comedy, it was a two-part adventure game. With the title sequence, music, bouncing ball, and ‘Ghostbusters!’ call we captured a lot of the fun from the film, but I can’t imagine trying to capture the tremendous comedic interplay between the cast.” Instead, Crane played to the strength of computer games themselves. “First, if you want to design a game around a licence, you have to be very careful. The best strategy is to design an original game that would stand alone even without the licence. Our original theory was that a licensed game should be a great game first, and a licensed game second. The success of the Ghostbusters game reinforced our belief – that was clearly the right way to go.”