Gremlins

Gremlins is a game based on the film of the same name, in which the player, as young Billy, tries to catch mischievous gremlins before midnight — creatures that multiplied and scattered across the small town after being splashed with water and fed after midnight. The player moves through a map of several connected locations — a store, a house, the street — and in each one must catch or drive off the gremlins before they cause further damage, all while time keeps ticking and chaos in the town keeps growing. The game thus translates the film's basic premise — don't feed the gremlins after midnight and don't get them wet — into a simple but fairly tense race against the clock. The player must weigh which location to visit first, since the gremlins keep multiplying and moving in the meantime, and unprotected locations can quickly spiral out of control.

On the Atari 5200, the game combines views of individual rooms and streets with simple but clear movement and interaction controls via joystick. The graphics reflect the platform's capabilities of the time — colorful, relatively simply drawn scenes — and the sound is sparse; the main emphasis lies on navigating the town map and planning which location to visit next, so the player can catch as many gremlins as possible in time and prevent them from multiplying further.

As a mid-1980s film license, Gremlins ranks among the solid, less ambitious titles in the Atari 5200's catalog, but by linking multiple locations into a single map and building around a race against time, it comes close to the light action-adventure genre. Today it is of interest mainly to film fans and collectors of licensed 1980s games, who will appreciate how a popular cultural phenomenon of the time was translated into a simple but functional game form on the console of the day, even while recognizing that it is more of a curiosity than a game that would stand on its own today.

Why play it: For film fans and collectors of licensed 1980s games, who will appreciate a simple but functional adaptation of a pop-culture phenomenon, more as a curiosity than a standalone game.