Friday the 13th

By 1989, the sanguinary Friday the 13th series and its bloodthirsty antihero Jason Voorhees had thoroughly saturated the North American marketplace. The movies, aesthetically and conceptually lacking though they may have been, were ubiquitous in popular culture, with a sequel in release or in production every single year in the 1980s. There was also a TV series bearing the Friday name and font which managed to gain modest critical acclaim—in no small part due to the complete absence of Jason Voorhees from the show. Alice Cooper had even laid down a straining shock-rock record—“The Man Behind the Mask”—inspired by the goalie-masked goliath. Inevitably, given the Nintendo Entertainment system's embeddedness in the day-to-day lives of children of the mid-to-late eighties, video-gaming was another market Friday the 13th would encroach upon, the R-rated aesthetics of the movies notwithstanding.

Friday the 13th for the NES took the form of a side-scroller in which players control one of six Crystal Lake camp counselors. Traversing water, woods and cabins, all the while battling wolves, crows and zombies (all of which are apocryphal to the movies), the goal is to find and defeat Jason Voorhees not once, not twice, but thrice. In the meantime, the rampaging Jason is killing not only the counselors, but also the children—yes, children—vacationing at the camp. Jason's mother's head, which has now acquired the extra-canonical ability to fly, also makes an appearance as an adversary.

This discussion of Friday the 13th’s gameplay is moot, however, as the game is unplayable. Its controls are exceedingly frustrating, leading to death after death for the counselor under your control (and the children, to boot). Moreover, the camp's confines are mostly rendered in bright, primary colors and thus provide little in the way of chills. The programmers, of course, had very little to work with given the 8-bit NES format, but still, one gets the impression they didn't even attempt to approximate the Friday the 13th aesthetic. There is also, perhaps most disappointingly, no opportunity to play as Jason. This is not a huge loss, however, as Jason is, when you do find him, clad in what looks to be a purple track-suit of some sort—seemingly more like senior's active wear than the ragged waterlogged vestments we would expect of an undead serial killer who dwells at the bottom of a lake.

I wouldn't recommend this game to even the most diehard fans of the film series. Firstly, it received far too wide a release to have any value as a collector's item. Secondly, it evades the hallowed so-bad-it's-good status, which may apply to movies such as those in the series, but really doesn't work for video games. Even the recent Friday the 13th release for Xbox One and PS4, while far from perfect, is at least able to capture the general feel of the films. The NES game, by contrast, is an abomination. Collectors would be better off saving their cash for anything else related to the series. This reviewer would instead suggest perusing EBay for the two—that's right, not one, but two—novelizations of Friday the 13th Part 3. One is by Simon Hawke, the other by movie-adaptation legend Michael Avallone. Even if you despise Friday the 13th or the act of reading itself, you will still appreciate these novels far more than this game.