Revisiting Friday the 13th from 1989 — one of the first TRUE survival horror video games ever!
I have been a proud defender of Friday the 13th on the NES pretty much my entire life. I’m probably more of an apologist for that game than I am even Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, and that’s saying something.
It’s not uncommon to find Friday the 13th on lists of the worst video games ever made. Nintendo Power magazine even listed it as one of the ten worst titles to ever make an appearance on a Nintendo console. It’s a game that’s loathed, detested, despised and ridiculed … but should it be?
The more you look at Friday the 13th on the NES the more amazing its mere existence becomes. It’s a Nintendo game based on one of the most notorious R-rated franchises of the 1980s and it did not try to sanitize the brand. It’s probably the only game on the NES where children are murdered and it’s one of the few games on the system that flat out tells you that your character is D-E-A-D on the game over screen. Frankly, I’m just surprised they didn’t find a way to sneak a little full frontal nudity in there while they were at it — or maybe a mini-game where Demon from part five has to rush to the outhouse to deal with his enchilada-spawned diarrhea.
It’s a game that takes some drastic liberties with the source material (more on that later), but for the most part it stays pretty true to the Friday the 13th mythology. In hindsight, it’s a pretty clever way of handling the license. At a time when virtually every licensed game on the NES was a shameless Mario clone, F13 at least tried something kinda new. It’s actually more of a board game-like strategy experience, where knowing where to place your characters is paramount to survival. It’s not a brain dead game at all and actually feels a bit ahead of its time in a lot of respects. Long, long before Resident Evil, you could argue that Friday the 13th was the “original” survival horror game.
The game was published by one-time toy manufacture LJN but it was actually designed by the Japanese firm Atlus (who would later go on to fame and fortune with the highly acclaimed Persona series.) You sorta get the idea that the guys at Atlus understood the whole Jason Voorhees thing to some degree, but didn’t quite grasp all of the nuts and bolts of the series. Remember that one Friday movie where Jason was purple and blue and zombies kept attacking the camp counselors? Yeah, me neither. But for every weirdo creative liberty taken, the game manages to nail something else about the core F13 experience almost perfectly. For starters, its sense of tension and dread is very impressive. A clock will pop up onscreen letting you know when and where Jason is attacking; once you find him, then it’s time to search a cabin in first-person mode, where the hockey-masked killer will undoubtedly emerge from nowhere to attack in little vignettes that feel a lot like that old boxing game, Punch-Out!! It’s an unusual way to approach the material, but it works. Every now and then Jason will even attack you out of the blue outside of the cabin sequences, which makes for quite the delicious jump scare. Really, Friday the 13th on the NES is scarier than just about any of the actual F13 movies — and how could it not be, when you’re staring down death incarnate and armed only with a handful of rocks that you can only throw in a useless arched, curving pattern?
The shortcomings of F13 are very obvious. The rules of the game are opaque and the map layout is often confusing. But it does add a lot of replay value to the experience, since there’s a lot of “hidden” cave space and wooded area to explore. You’ll eventually find Jason’s hidden lair and come face to face with Mrs. Voorhees’ flying, disembodied head if you’re adventurous enough, and there actually is quite a bit to explore. In a neat little nod to part two, you can even “arm” yourself with Pamela’s sweater and take Jason to task with a pitchfork — although, sadly, the chainsaw didn’t make it into this one. I guess it was just too hard to animate, I take it?
Yes, it’s a frustrating game to a certain extent but its atmospherics are just fantastic. The music is great and appropriately creepy and it’s pretty cool watching the day and night cycle unfurl before your very eyes. It’s repetitive to some degree and a few of the characters are crappier than other, but you’ll figure out what to do (and what to not do) after a couple of hours playing the game. It’s not an intuitive game at first, but that’s what makes it so enjoyable all these years later. There’s real depth and nuance here, and you have to admire the people who made it for not shying away from all that complexity.
People are starting to celebrate the game, thankfully. After decades of being shat upon as the nadir of the NES generation, Friday the 13th is finally being recognized as an inadvertent survival horror pioneer. Games like Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Clock Tower and Haunting Ground are basically just higher-tech versions of what F13 offered first: a game where you were stalked by a nigh-unkillable enemy from start to finish, where simply fleeing from confrontation was usually the smartest move to make. It may not have the sex, the weed, the foul language or the blood spray, but it still manages to capture the essence of the Jason movies remarkably well.
Today Friday the 13th is considered something of a cult classic — a flawed and imperfect game that gets points for trying something totally unconventional and being way ahead of its time in terms of structure and manipulating the emotions of players. It’s one of those games I simply cannot hate even though it gives you plenty of reasons to dislike it. Despite its failings, F13 remains one of the more memorable NES games out there, considering it evoked pangs of genuine fear at a time when most games wouldn’t even dare attempt it.
It only took 30 plus years and some change, but the masses are FINALLY starting to come to their senses and give F13 some love and gratitude. And that’s for good reason; pretty much EVERY scary game released over the last 37 years owes at least some of its existence to this title.
