Ghosts'n Goblins

Ghosts'n Goblins arrived on the Commodore 64 in 1986 in a conversion by Elite Systems based on Capcom's famous arcade machine. Playing as the knight Arthur, the player makes their way through graveyards, forests, and castles full of zombies, demons, and other undead creatures to rescue an abducted princess. The core of the gameplay is jumping over traps and enemies combined with throwing spears and other weapons, and a single hit is enough to strip the knight of his armor, with a second hit killing him – so the game punishes even minor mistakes and demands precise judgment of distance and timing. Along the way the player can also pick up other weapons, such as daggers, axes, or a magic shield, which at least partly expands the player's options against overwhelming numbers of enemies.

On the C64's eight-bit hardware, the conversion managed to preserve the source material's distinctive dark atmosphere, with detailed backgrounds of graveyards and castle walls, though it required necessary compromises in smoothness of movement and the number of enemies shown on screen at once compared to the arcade original. The musical score underscored the gothic mood well, and the sound effects clearly signaled hits as well as the collection of bonus items, such as armor or magic weapons that change Arthur's attack. The game's difficulty was already seen as extremely high at launch, which made it a legendary symbol of uncompromising eight-bit action, where getting a few screens further meant a genuine victory.

Ghosts'n Goblins is still cited today as an example of a brutally hard but honestly designed action platformer, where failure almost always stems from the player's own mistake rather than unfair design. Its influence on the genre is evident in how it helped establish the archetype of a knight fighting hordes of the undead, one that still appears in many other games and in Capcom's own sequels to the series. For today's player it's a challenge mainly for old-school fans, but as a record of what demanding arcade action looked like on a home computer in the mid-1980s, it still deserves attention today.

Why play: For old-school fans wanting to experience a brutally hard yet fairly designed action platformer at the roots of Capcom's entire series, Ghosts'n Goblins on the C64 remains a challenge worth the attention.