Yes.
Here I’m going to talk about Konami’s vision of the 1985 summer spectacular, courtesy of Pepsi and Baby Ruth.
It’s interesting. This is a me thing; I’m not saying that it’s representative of anything more profound than that: for me, Konami’s original version of The Goonies – or more precisely, its arcade variation, Vs. The Goonies – is the idealized 8-bit game. When I think of 8-bit game design, what comes to me isn’t Super Mario Bros. or Choplifter, but a hundred variations of The Goonies.
It’s worth noting the timing with this work. The Goonies is only technically a post-Super Mario game. Super Mario Bros. came out in September, 1985; The Goonies, in February 1986. That’s just five months. I realize that games iterated rapidly back then – I think Mega Man 2 was completed, concept to final code, in three months. Still, as far as the time it takes to digest a work and understand what it’s doing that’s distinctive, and deriving your own ideas off of that, five months from a game’s first release seems like a really short turnaround to make anything of substance. So although its designers may have drawn some influence, it’s probably more helpful to search back further for precedent – older PC games and simple platformers like Mappy. You can almost certainly trace Mappy back to Donkey Kong. We can leave out the original Mario Bros., as it was released a few months after Mappy (and, curiously, is much simpler in design – borrowing as it does from Joust).
So in design terms The Goonies feels like a bit of a breath of fresh air – like a result of an alternative history of Japanese design, where Miyamoto said his peace and then passed the baton. We got Space Invaders, then Pac-Man, then Donkey Kong, then Mappy (I presume), then The Goonies. We now have this refined idea of an avatar wandering around in a 2D environment, hopping around and uncovering secrets, but it’s of a much more cosmopolitan heritage than you tend to see in later platformers.
And I just love it. The Goonies is seriously one of my favorite games ever. It took a while to notice why this (probably) was, but even games that slightly resemble it – Ghost House, Dr. Chaos – tend to earn my affection. Yet, this isn’t a game that anyone really talks about much. You might see people muse about its also-interesting sequel, since that got a commercial release in the US. Even that discussion, though, has changed over time. 30-ish years ago The Goonies II was held in pretty high regard as an example of a deep, nonlinear action-adventure game. These days it seems to baffle people more than not. Its secrets are too opaque, and what’s probably more significant, it matches our codified ideas of a “Metroidvania” enough to draw a direct comparison, yet it doesn’t match closely enough for people to call it a good example of the form. Ergo, it’s a bad example of the form. Ergo, it’s kind of a failure.
I may be reaching here; I’m not basing this on anything in particular. Feel free to check me on it. But people seem way more dismissive of The Goonies II than they used to be. Recall that Konami once regarded The Goonies well enough internally to make the series a central part of both of its “Konami crossover” Wai Wai World games. This was reasonably high-profile stuff, once.
But, we’ll get to the sequels and Goonilikes. Here I want to talk about the original. Or, the arcade version of the original.
Back when visiting an arcade was a journey of discovery, Vs. The Goonies was an elusive prize. You never knew what you’d see when you walked into a new arcade, or an old one after too long. You’d hope you’d see something new, that would expand your understanding of what a videogame could be – you can flip over bannisters! You can climb the fence! You can pick up the enemies’ weapons! And you’d hope to see a few old favorites, that still carried an elusive magic. If you saw an OutRun cabinet or Shinobi, you knew what you were doing with your tokens. You could kind of tell what to expect the moment you walked in, because every game chimed out its own distinctive soundscape. You’d hear the murmur of clashing music, and then through that cut all of the incidental sound effects, the sounds you’d barely hear when you were actually playing. There was the icy ping, pong of Arkanoid. The clashing sword of Rastan. And then there was… everything that happened in Vs. The Goonies; the item pick-up sounds, the sound when Mikey got hit, the sound when new items appeared, the brief ditty when Mikey died. If it was there, you knew it, the way you knew a demon was out there in the darkness of Doom.
You didn’t see Vs. The Goonies much, so when you did heed its herald and dramatically sought it out, every time it felt like you were stumbling upon a Zoltar machine. Here it was, at last, again. When would you ever get another chance to play it? Hard to say. Best make the most of it, then.
The game itself plays right into that mystique: it’s a game of secrets, genial yet occluded. It seems so straightforward, and it doesn’t make an effort to explain itself, yet the moment you start to play it you realize nothing is quite as obvious as it looks. There are hidden items everywhere. Jump or kick in the right place to collect diamonds or other bonuses, most largely unimportant but all feeling precious. Furthering this sense, the items are all hidden in the walls. You need to kick rats to earn bombs, that you can use to blow open skull doors to get anything good.
As the game goes on, each level requires more exploration. You’re looking for keys, really, to unlock a big spiky door leading to the next level. Sometimes if you kick a rat, it turns into a fox. Who knows why. You stumble into several inventory items, the purpose of which is not immediately clear. I’m not tackling these ideas in linear path, because you don’t see them as linear when you’re playing. It’s all a bundle of mystery, which seems so simple and threatens to make sense, and which gives easily to pressure yet never quite tips its hand to become cozy and familiar in the way that* Super Mario Bros.* eventually does. I’d draw some parallels to The Legend of Zelda, except Zelda eventually makes sense and feels familiar. You come to feel some ownership over at least parts of the game, and some safety in retreating there.
Even if you come to understand all of the power-ups and memorize item locations, the world of The Goonies never feels like you can own it. It exists just out of reach, as a place you can visit (in the event that you can find it, in real life) but never quite stay. The whole time you’re there, a surprisingly tight clock is counting down – and you’re being chased. Unlike the rats and foxes, there’s no poofing away the Fratellis. The actual people are there to stay. You can disable them for a moment, but then they get right back up and keep pursuing you. They’re not exactly smart; this is a Famicom game from 1986. Still, they add to this sense of a thing that’s bigger than you, a world beyond your ken that you’re just trying to navigate.
It’s like they’re the Gorgs in Fraggle Rock. Or so many threats in real life, that a kid is not prepared to handle head-on. Particularly in the pre-Nickelodeon era, the world is not made for kids; kids are tolerated with varying levels of objection in a world of adults. You’d think that more people would be sensitive to the plights of less-represented people – women, non-whites – as we all go through this. There’s always a world out there, operating by rules that we don’t quite understand, that holds us in a mutually understood if unspoken contempt. It’s just that some of us manage to grow into that world and learn to play by its laws; others are not provided that opportunity.
What the best Goonilikes share with the original, for all of the familiarity of presence that they facilitate through existing as actual commercially available products, is this almost supernatural sense of a system, a world beyond our grasp. Dr. Chaos plays roughly like The Goonies II, filtered through a nightmare. You never know when some innocuous action will cause a David Lynch bogeyman to leap out of a crack between cabinets and mercilessly chase you from one game mode to the next.
In Ghost House, random arrows and daggers fly from off-screen and lodge in your skull. Or, sometimes, you can jump on them and pick them up and make them your own. The halls are littered with secret passages, both in the fabric of the level design and (rather like skull doors in The Goonies) the backdrop. Hitting a lightbulb creates a violent sound effect, makes the screen flash, and stops time. Why? Because that’s how this world works. You’re a visitor here. You can’t expect to understand everything.
The miraculously appearing items are a trope from games of this era. Wonder Boy (released two months later, in April 1986) in particular glories in them, but here It’s more than videogame logic. It all feels occult, like dream logic. You’re locked in an enclosed little world – a haunted house of sorts, where normal experience does not apply. It seems clear that your actions produce results – some beneficial, some quite violent – but the rationale is hidden. Experimentation can be dangerous, and may not lead to a deep understanding, further than discovering what actions seem to work the best at any given moment. Always putting out fires, always snatching what you can get, carefully, gingerly poking at the fabric of the world, hoping for the best.
This plays closely into my vision of what a videogame can and should be. I don’t mean it should be a hoppy little occluded haunted house platformer; I mean that our relationship with a videogame is one of experimentation. We’re given a portal to a world of rules, where the things that we do produce results, and we’re meant to do something with this information to plan our future relationship with the world. The rules that shape this world don’t have to make sense to us, and maybe ideally, if we’re going to spend our time with something outside our normal experience, they should challenge our conventional understanding – be that about our own behaviors or the world that we live in. Or, ideally, both.
I’m not saying The Goonies really does all of that. It’s a thirty-year-old, obscurely designed licensed game that (despite its apparent popularity back home) its publisher never even saw fit to release to a wide audience here. It doesn’t provide much in the way of answers. But, perhaps more importantly, it raises questions. It creates spaces for wonder in a way that partially by circumstance few of its close-ish contemporaries, even the most wondrous like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, quite managed. As fascinating as it is for all of its own reasons, with its lack of a time limit and so many places to safely explore even The Goonies II feels more grounded, if even less clear in its mysteries. It just feels… kind of Falcomish.
Which is another thing. It’s a thing I won’t get into here, though.
What other games could safely be described as Goonilikes? These would be enclosed side-scrolling platformers that use most of the vertical space for architecture, and communicate largely through mystery and obfuscation hidden on a layer beneath an apparently straighforward, even simplistic, action game.
