Beetlejuice (NES)! Beetlejuice (GB)! Beetlejuice (PC)!

Beetlejuice came to theaters in 1989, and while I didn't see it on the big screen, I caught it as soon as it came to our local VHS rental place. It was the perfect mix of creepy, funny and fun to get me absolutely hooked. We eventually got an action figure line from Kenner, makers of the wonderful Real Ghostbusters toy line, as well as a cartoon show that took quite a few liberties with the source material to make it work, but I still found it enjoyable, especially since it made Beetlejuice and Lydia the main stars, not to mention that great opening with Danny Elfman's score!

So of course with any hot franchise kids were into in the 80s, there were video games as well, and while none of them were fantastic, they had enough Beetlejuice charm in them to keep me happy. Two of the three I'll go over I enjoyed from my childhood, while the third I'm coming at with a completely fresh take.

Beetlejuice on NES comes to us from publisher LJN. There's been tons of hot takes online about what LJN means when it comes to games, but to me, it usually means an idea that's pretty good, but was not given enough time or financing to make it truly shine. Some other examples are Jaws, Friday the 13th, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. All of them have unique takes on the source material, and try to do something different with their gameplay. But I feel that due to being rushed none of them ever get to truly be what they could have been. The same could be said of Beetlejuice, although this one is a much more traditional approach, mostly going for a straightforward platformer. It'd developed by Rare and the music is composed by David Wise, so it certainly has talent behind it.

In this game, you play Beetlejuice as he...invades the Deetz's house by way of running around and platforming? And going through caverns? It plays fast and loose with the movie. But it DOES bother to show us Barbara and Adam Maitland dying in the river after going over the bridge for some reason, even though I don't think they ever appear in this game (edit: Barbara shows up in the top-down level 3, you have to bring her the Handbook for the Recently Deceased). As you make your way through stages, you'll find shops run by the shrunken head victim from the movie. He seems much more chipper now, and he'll sell you useful powerups if you give him help vouchers. You earn them mostly by defeating enemies, or even by just squishing the bugs that pop out of holes. Oddly enough I think one particular powerup is necessary to defeat the first boss. At the end of the first stage, you'll see Charles Deetz (I think?) who will try to kill you with bug spray. Try as you might you're not going to hurt him. It's not explained to you, but you need to knock him back far enough that he hits the wall behind him, which will defeat him. And to do that you need the skeleton scare. You have to be careful, because it has very limited shots, and if you die in this room, I think you respawn in here and can't leave, meaning you're now stuck until you game over and continue.

After a couple of platforming levels you'll be wandering around in a top-down map of the main house. In a great nod to the movie, Deelia's sculptures that come to life near the finale are wandering around here as enemies. This area is pretty tough and requires you to talk to people and find items to get keys to open doors, but at times a ghost door will chase after you, and if it catches you it sends you to Saturn, the sandy place where the sandworms roam around from the movie, and while I'm sure there's a way to escape Saturn I have never figured it out for myself and get a game over. The third level is interesting, but there's a weird bit of randomness to it. Some doors will take you to Saturn, and you won't know until you've tried it and then try and remember for next time. Or there's boxes scattered around, and some of them have helpful items, and some are just immovable obstacles and some have enemies hiding in them and you won't know until you try to walk through them.

When I played through recently on an emulator to refresh my memory, I got pretty much as far as I've ever gotten in level 3, then got a game over, and instead of reloading my last save point, I accidentally saved at my game over. So level 3 is STILL as far as I've ever gotten. But like I said earlier, this is a typical LJN game, where there's some good ideas mixed in with some rushed production. Though I'd say this game definitely ranks below Jaws and Friday the 13th and maybe below Roger Rabbit as well?

Next we have Beetlejuice for IBM PCs, which is a single screen arcade-like game made from High Tech Expressions. I've not looked it up on YouTube, but someone has to have done videos covering this company, because I feel like they're the LJN of PC games in the sense that they had so many licenses and the quality could vary pretty greatly.

Whereas the NES game was based on Beetlejuice the movie, High Tech Expression's game is based on the Beetlejuice cartoon series. It's called "Skeletons in the Closet", and in it, Beetlejuice has literal skeletons in his closet that have escaped (skeletons in the closet being a slang term for lies). Each screen will have at least one skeleton roaming around, and you've got to attack it to knock it into a pile of bones. After you do that, an AI controlled Lydia will come over and vacuum the bones. If she doesn't make it over in time, the bones will re-animate and turn a different color, indicating they are now faster. Each time you knock a skeleton down an icon will appear above them for a powerup, which you keep until you lose a life. You start off being able to throw slime in front of you, but you'll find a spreadshot like powerup, and one that will fire in directions all around you. But my favorite has always been the head icon, which allows you to throw Beetlejuice's head like a boomerang clear across the screen.

If Lydia get touched by a skeleton, she'll be caged and is unable to vacuum the enemies. The next time you knock a skeleton down, the powerup icon should be a lightning bolt, which will free her. Eventually Beetlejuice's friends from the cartoon show will show up. They walk around harmlessly, though if a skeleton touches them they learn of a lie Beetlejuice told and they go into a rage, quickly running around the screen. They will kill Beetlejuice if they touch him, and can cage Lydia. Also, if you stand still for too long, a sandworm will appear beneath your feet and try to eat you, so you want to make sure to always keep moving.

And that's pretty much the whole game. As the levels continue, more skeletons will appear, and some will take more than one hit, but there's not much variety. As far as score attack pick up and play games go, it's not bad, and it's worth trying out for the fun of it.

Finally we have Beetlejuice on the Game Boy, which was once again brought to use by LJN. I'm not sure if Rare handled this one or not, and I don't trust the Wiki page enough to say either way. But unlike the NES game, this one follows the cartoon show. In this game, you play as Beetlejuice helping clear Lydia's house of hauntings.

You wander about the house in a side-scrolling format, go in a door, and then you'll be tasked with somehow getting rid of the ghost in that room. Sometimes it's that the ghosts are haunting items in the room, and you need to avoid getting hit while attacking the items enough to get the ghosts to leave, them continue attacking them. Other times they switch it up and you'll have to do some kind of gimmicky task like a Pipe Dream like puzzle, which luckily I really like Pipe Dream, so I thought that was fun. One time I had to do a 'scary face contest', which consisted of me changing up different parts of my face and getting a higher scare score. I didn't really know what I was doing as I scrolled through the face features, but soon after I was then facing off against a ghost in a scare off, which had me hitting button presses as fast as I could. Correct presses made a meter go up and incorrect ones made it go back down. I had to fill the meter before the ghost. I'm guessing that the scary face I constructed somehow fed into how much the meter would go up from button presses but I wasn't really sure.

Of the three games, this is the one I went into blind recently, having never owned it. I'd say it's a perfectly serviceable licensed Beetlejuice game, and if I got it when I was a kid I'm sure I would have been plenty happy and played the heck out of it. The graphics are nice and detailed, with a pretty good looking Beetlejuice sprite. The backgrounds are well-detailed in each room, and being based off the cartoon I feel like they are able to use that style to their advantage and not have to worry about trying to make realistic renders or anything. I did enjoy the nod to Dylia's sculpture from the movie walking around once again. Each room challenge was usually easy to understand, and once I completed it I felt compelled to find the next door and see what the next challenge would be.

I got up to what I'm guessing is kind of like the boss challenge of the first area, two ghosts you have to trap in the attic. The way to catch them was a bit more roundabout, one you have to corral into an open chest, and another you have to get to burn itself on one of several candles. I failed a couple of times with this one and stopped there, but I might go back and give it another try sometime to see what the next area of the house is.

So there you have it, three vastly different takes on the Beetlejuice franchise in video game form! None of them are amazing, but I think they all have enough originality and weirdness to them to make them unique and interesting, and worth some play time. I still have a fondness for the NES game, although revisiting it for this article definitely made me realize I was looking through some rose tinted glasses for sure. With the upcoming Beetlejuice sequel hitting theaters this year, will we see a brand new Beetlejuice game to add to the collection? Well...no, I'm pretty sure we won't. The most we can probably hope for is a Beelejuice skin running around Fortnite, right? ...sigh. So might as well make the most of it and play through some older Beetlejuice games.

Happy gaming!