The Addams Family

I was age six and scared to cloth-touching

The conservatory level

Raul Julia who played Gomez Addams in the hugely successful Addams Family films, is dead 15 years this year and whilst there are better ways of marking the death of a great actor, follows a review of one of the most addictive games released on all platforms back in 1991.

The game is set in the clandestine little world of Addams where ghosts and gouls trawl the hollow graveyards and the lost souls of bodies long since decayed quiver in pain beneath the dank of the moonlight.

Such a decadent game with satanic dark themes and neverending battles with the undead was never a good antedote for insomnia, especially for a six year old as I was at the time.

But this is a game I remember enforcing my first taste of the occult. The startled and vibrant imagination of a young boy consumed the Addams world from where the movie stopped short. Close your eyes and imagine you’re in that haunted castle atop the hill in, well, wherever it was the film was set, and your subconscious thundered forward with excitement.

Through underwater canals, steaming ahead as a passenger on a microscopic train with Borrower-commuters before wriggling free, soaked after a journey in the domestic human tube service. The possibilities were endless inside the house before you would nervously wade through the cesspit of a garden stopping at the graves of all the people who still regularly visited for tea.

It was deeply haunting but powerfully engaging, what six year old could resist being drawn in to reconnect with this little universe night after night. Under the covers it was my little universe.

Your character, Gomez Addams had lost all members of his family, save for Lurch and Thing who never bloody helped, and had to find them by entering five different rooms in the house.

Each room led to five confusing and disturbing worlds of torment and torture with different enemies. In the garden where eventually Uncle Fester can be found, you  avoid the pitfalls of poisonous butterflies, exploding tomatos and ugly big tortoise-looking things.  Whereas it’s ghosts and the undead in the graveyard as you pursue Wednesday.

Each world led to a different, angry and frightfully distressing level-boss often a giant bird or dragon. All the time the theme music, that extra instigator of insanity chipped away at your soul as you wrestled the demons of the night; it was menacing and brilliantly effective.

I just couldn’t draw myself away. The character’s life span was endless, remember when you had mastered Marioworld and had 99 lives before calling on one of your continues? That kind of endless.

The gameplay was addictive, so frustrating when you got it wrong, and so rewarding when right. It’s was possibly the longest game of its kind at the time, averaging six different themes of level before retriving just one member of the family and guarenteed you would lose 20 lifes along the way.

It was so easy to get impatient but that little world always drew you back, offering rewards in the guise of weapons or Sonic the Hedgehog-esque trainers that helped you speed through the levels. There were cheat options you could exchange with your friends and despite not being a two player game it was a communal sport.

Life-about rules when playing in a group of friends often means waiting for an hour before you get your shot and ruin it by dying in seconds in some freak accident. But Addams Family lives were so easily gained and lost, the rotation round the room was rapid and each rotation became evermore frustrating.

The mark of a good game from back in the day is that I still play it now and regress to being six. I load up my old SNES (usually six or seven times including a strategic slap and it finally works) sit down and play and go back through my portal, back to Narnia where I am alone in the dead of night with no one but the undead for company.

It was just captivating, there were so many reasons to turn off The Addams Family but like Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (yes I somehow make the comparison) the game like the film, wins. You know it’s beating you but you enjoy it and you keep on playing along.

Ocean who made the game, and pretty well everything else at the time, created a gem of a game. Age six, under the covers, visually and audibly scared to cloth-touching were optimum conditions to playing this one.

A torturously beautiful little game, I’m saddened there hasn’t been an iPhone demand for it and i’ve not yet seen it since avalable on a 21st Century platform. Someone direct me, I want my childhood back.