Digital Blood: A Story about Wizard Video Games

Making a video game based on a movie is a good idea. You get instant name recognition and might get fans of the film to buy the game. The game doesn’t have to be good, but it does have to be playable.

As long as the movie has fans, you can exploit the source material and make something close to the plot or, at the very least, something with the characters. This is where Wizard Video made a mistake. They were exploitation filmmakers, and that type of film wouldn’t always work as a video game. Even with the lack of quality control on the Atari 2600.

This quickly got out of hand. When I tried to figure out where the controversy surrounding Texas Chainsaw Massacre started, I fell into a feedback loop of insanity. It felt like something was created on the internet, and it was repeated enough to be perceived as fact. Basically, I don’t know if these were controversial games.

Wizard Video (The Movies)

Wizard Video had one thing going for them. They had the rights to many movies and could use those to make video games. Some of them could be; I don’t think anyone would want to play a game based on Emmanuelle in 1983.

They had the rights to a bunch of movies, but I don’t think they had the video game rights. While this means movies like Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West and Robot Holocaust wouldn’t have video game tie-ins on the Atari, things were probably better that way. We also wouldn’t get a video game adaptation of Miss Nude America.

I’m trying to say they had a truly crazy filmography. At some other time, they could’ve taken advantage of the movies they helped to distribute. Unfortunately, this wasn’t that time.

Wizard was one of the subsidiaries of Empire International Pictures. Empire would shut down in 1988. This brought an end to Wizard, Force, and Cult Video. Wizard would come back in the mid-2010s. I’m unsure if Wizard Video was shut down between 1988 and 2013. It is beyond the scope of what I wanted to do here. One rabbit hole at a time!

Wizard Video Games

Wizard Video Games released three games. Two are for the Atari 2600, and one is for home computers. The two Atari 2600 games, Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are the important ones. The other is a movie trivia game.

Wizard was the publisher of these games. The developers were former Games by Apollo employees. We’ll get more into that in the next section.

Both of these games are what you would expect from an Atari game from this time. They had no end goal, and you were playing for points. They were also rather graphic by Atari standards.

Both games had pixelated blood and human-looking sprites. It is still an Atari 2600, so you need to use your imagination a bit, but not as much as other games. These were two of the early examples of horror video games.

The two previews that I found are interesting, to say the least. While Halloween’s preview is okay and does a decent job explaining the game, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre preview is odd. It reads like the author knows the movie exists but hasn’t seen it. It is very strange.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre preview is more critical of the game. While it doesn’t give a score, it is clear that the author doesn’t like the game. You play as the killer, and your goal is to kill random women. I can see why people might have been upset in 1983.

Reviewers have been very harsh on these games. I’m not sure what they were expecting from an Atari 2600 game. This was going on before AVGN and seems to have started in 1998. Unfortunately, the source site, AllGame, went defunct, and the reviews of both games are no longer available. Welcome to the hell that was my Thursday night.

I haven’t been able to find other reviews or previews of these games from 1983-1984. The two that I found aren’t all that bad. I’m not sure where the aggregator sites got scores for the 1983 previews because none of the games in that magazine have scores attached to the articles.

Edit: I found a few more reviews. Thankfully, some wonderful person has collected a few of them. The consensus on Texas Chainsaw Massacre was that the game was dull. Halloween was received better, and some of the reviewers liked it. A lot of the issues seem to be with playing the killer in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The sound is also a huge issue for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while Halloween’s sound is received positively. Modern reviews pan the graphics of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I don’t think it looks that different from other Atari 2600 games. The gameplay and sound have way more issues than the graphics.

While trying to find the source of the backlash from retailers, I fell into an infuriating loop. Wikipedia cites a random blog as the source for this. The blog cites Wikipedia as the source for the information. Other blogs do the same thing if they bother to source it at all. It is things like this that make me want to drink.

There is an interview with Ed Salvo, one of the more well-known developers from Games by Apollo and VSS, done by Digital Press. I’m not sure of the exact date of the interview, but Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are brought up. Ed doesn’t shed much light on them aside from how long it took to make them and that he isn’t all that proud of the games.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has a timeline for video game controversies. It is incomplete and lacks sourcing, but what is important is what isn’t there, specifically what isn’t in the timelines. There is no mention of arcades being banned, and the two Wizard Video Games are absent. Another dead end.

I think I’ve gone as far as I’m willing to go for this. If I make a post on video game controversies, I’ll revisit this and try to get to the bottom of things. I’m guessing the answer would be in some of the newspapers from 1983-84. At this point, I’m unsure if the consensus on why they had poor sales is true.

Halloween seems to get lumped in with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t a bad game. It also didn’t get the same scrutiny from the reviewers at the time. Some of the reviewers actually liked it.

The Ashes of Games by Apollo, VSS

Wizard Video didn’t make the two games. They were a publisher similar to CBS Electronics. The publisher was a company called Video Software Specialists (VSS). This company was made up of former Games by Apollo employees. VSS would also work with CBS Electronics.

Six games were attributed to that company:

• Glacier Patrol (1988)
• Quest for Quintana Roo (1984)
• Gust Buster (1983)
• Halloween (1983)
• Rolloverture (1983)
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1983)

This is just the list that I could find. There might be more games out there as each developer would have careers after leaving Apollo.

It is nice to see what the developers of Games by Apollo got up to after the company was shut down. I thought I was done with the company. I’m guessing there are more connections like this with some other companies.

Final Thoughts

This has been very interesting to look into. These two games aren’t anything special, but they are rather important to video game history. I find Wizard Video way more interesting than the three video games they made.

These were two of the first horror games, and they were some of the more graphic games of their time. I would compare them to Exidy’s Death Race. The controversy around these games is something that baffles me, not because of the controversy but because I can’t find evidence of it.

There is a lawsuit between Atari and Mystique regarding pornographic games. With the Wizard game, I have a plethora of unsourced blogs and articles, all from the 2000s and 2010s. It is something that I’ll have to look into later.

Once again, I have one big question without an answer. It is always strange when the internet repeats something until it becomes fact, but where did it start? I’ll have to save that for another time.