The Movie Monster Game

The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsters surrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.

War of the Monsters

All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.

There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”

Rodan (1956)

While the original 1954 Godzilla remains a startling effective film, it’s clearly also something improvising a genre as it went along, experimenting with special effects, with tone, and with ideas throughout its run time—it becomes its most cohesive mainly during its latter half. It’s the starting point for all kaiju films to follow, but the point where Ishiro Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, and the rest of their crew really found the path forward was two years later in Rodan (Japanese title Giant Monster of the Sky Radon, and the name will always have two vowel-switched regional variations for the rest of time), the first kaiju film in colour, and the one where Honda found a steady way to handle this type of story. It is kind of amazing to see what a difference two years can make, and how quickly these filmmakers went from figuring out how similar and different these movies could be from their American counterparts to finding their footing in this entirely idiosyncratic take on monster movie, allowing them to experiment with the details of the genre instead.

Gorgo (1961)

While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.

You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.

Creature Classic Companion: Mothra (1961)

Toho was seven years into the Great Kaiju Project, having produced sombre nuclear disaster stories like Godzilla (or The H-Man) and more traditional prehistoric monster mayhem like Rodan (or Varan), and were really putting in the work to find the next big (BIG!) giant monster film. This involved hiring three authors (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta) to write a serialized print story that was then given to screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote previous Toho genre projects Varan and Battle In Outer Space, and would write the massive King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962) to adapt. The story that resulted has the city destruction scenes you’d expect, but otherwise was very different from previous kaiju movies: lighter in tone, more fantastical, and less a grim warning of humanity’s negative impact on this planet than a gentle reminder, and all based around a rather unusual monster (which is also one of the few explicitly female giant monsters.) Sure, there were giant insect movies well before Mothra, but none were this colourful, and certainly none posited that the enlarged arthropod was probably in the right.

Of all the non-Godzilla Toho genre movies, Mothra probably had the largest impact, and its titular lepidopteran would thereon become the company’s second most recognizable creature, appearing frequently alongside the King of the Monsters (Godzilla movies featuring Mothra were often the most well-attended ones in their eras, just to show how much the Japanese audiences dug that bug.) The original movie reflected the changing tone in giant monster movies in the new decade, with subsequent movies often maintaining a similarly lighter touch with much more upbeat endings that allowed the monster to live on—but very few of them have the consistent sense of whimsy that this one does. It really feels like Sekizawa, director Ishiro Honda, and effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya understood exactly how a movie featuring a giant caterpillar that becomes a giant moth, alongside a duo of tiny singing women, should look and feel, creating something that is a little strange and a little beautiful (and even a little satirical), and one of their most cohesive monster fantasies.

Monster Multimedia: King of the Monsters 2

How does one follow up on a game about giant monsters wrestling through major cities? Giant monsters are already quite outlandish, so what can you do to up the stakes and give the audience something fresh rather than just retreading the same destruction-laden ground? In the case of King of the Monsters, you go back to the source material, and do exactly what the old kaiju movies did: bring in aliens.

…But don’t just bring in aliens, bring in the grossest-looking aliens that could ever have come out of the wildest nightmares of your design team.

Monster Multimedia: King of the Monsters

It’s always been a bit of a disappointment for me as a fan of both video games and kaiju that there aren’t very many kaiju-based games period, let alone many particularly good ones. For whatever reason, the pure visual spectacle of giant creatures smashing up each other (alongside entire cities) is something a lot of game developers and publishers don’t find enticing enough to work with. A lot of genres with cult or nerd roots—high fantasy, space opera, gory horror—have been the basis for many games, so many that the chance of some of them becoming exceptional is very high. Meanwhile, fans of giant monsters have had slim pickings for decades—the most recent game with heavy use of classical kaiju motifs is the 2017 Japan-only release City Shrouded in Shadow, a follow-up to the older Disaster Report series featuring actual licensed monsters like Godzilla and Ultraman, and the only one before that was a 2015 Godzilla game released to a thunderously lukewarm reception. But I bet kaiju fans still took notice of those games, because if they don’t rely entirely on games or series that merely take inspiration from the form (like Pokémon), they have always been forced to cling to whatever they could find.