The horror movie game that time forgot | Arachnophobia: The Video Game (1991)

I am Jason Kleeberg, this is Force Five, and today we’re looking at five things about the 1991 MS DOS video game adaptation of the film Arachnophobia.

Arachnophobia was released in 1990 and stars Jeff Daniels as Ross Jennings, a doctor who moves his family from San Francisco to the small fictional town of Canaima, California. While he’s going through his move, a newly discovered, extremely venomous spider hitches a ride from South America to Canaima inside a coffin. The spider starts breeding, people start dying, and Dr. Jennings has one particularly unfortunate character trait for this situation that is shared by millions of people worldwide - he’s terrified of spiders.

This movie was the feature directorial debut of legendary producer Frank Marshall, who had already worked on movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, all of which have their own games, by the way. Marshall said that Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was a major influence on how he approached the film.

Most of the spiders in the film are real Avondale spiders and Marshall and supervising entomologist Steve Kutcher basically had to figure out which spiders were good at which jobs. So they held a sort of spider-olympics and kept spiders separated based on their particular abilities. Think, specialist spider actors.

One year later, Arachnophobia became a video game. It was developed by BlueSky Software, published by Disney Software and was released for computers including MS DOS, Amiga and Commodore 64.

This didn’t appear to be a soulless cash grab, however, as co-producer David Mullich said that the BlueSky team visited the movie set during development, met the film’s spider wrangler and got to see firsthand how the filmmakers were creating Arachnophobia.

They decided that playing as Dr. Jennings wouldn’t be that exciting so instead, you play as Delbert McClintock, the eccentric exterminator played by John Goodman in the film. You drive his exterminator van around looking for infested buildings, enter one and spray spiders, destroy egg sacs and use chemical bombs. You can even turn your pesticide sprayer into a flamethrower, a totally understandable route when your house is infested with killer spiders. Burn…it…down.

So can you actually play the movie, does the film translate from screen to start button? Kind of. The basic ingredients are definitely here - South American spider infestation, Canaima, Delbert, those are all part of what makes the movie work. What it’s missing is the fear, specifically the kind of fear Frank Marshall said he wanted to portray which was being scared of ordinary situations. Putting your feet into your slippers. Reaching into a bowl of popcorn. Walking into your bathroom. 

The movie is scary because these spiders can be anywhere, but the game couldn’t really do that. They’re not hiding somewhere to make you uncomfortable, they’re just regular video game enemies. They run toward you, jump at you, or dangling in front of you and you’re just shooting poison at them while hunting down the nests. So it’s not so much, “Oh my god, where’s the spider?”, it’s “There’s the spider, kill it.” So you’re playing inside the world of Arachnophobia, but not really getting the feeling of Arachnophobia.

Now, this game also kind of feels like a pseudo sequel. Or maybe a different multi-verse timeline. This is an arachnophobia where Delbert is front and center. So how do you get more Delbert? More spiders. Contrary to the plot of the film, the infestation keeps spreading and Delbert needs to clear seven different towns and places of spiders, places like the aptly named Webster, Arachton and Infes Station.

When you’re done clearing out those towns, you’re summoned to South America to destroy the nest, by none other than entomologist Dr. James Atherton, the guy from the beginning of the 1990 film. Sure, it kind of makes sense that the man discovered this species has heard that it’s in America and has called up this local exterminator to come to South America to destroy the hive, but using the film’s logic, that’s tough…because - spoilers incoming for Arachnophobia - Atherton is dead. Yeah, he dies in the movie, but here, not so much.

Back in the day, a movie would come out, a quickly made or repurposed cash grab game was rushed onto the shelves, everyone hated it and then forgot about it, but that’s not what happened here. I like that the developers visited the Arachnophobia movie set, they tried to understand the aesthetics of the film and translated it into their own thing. And while it never set the world on fire, it also wasn’t that bad. Would I recommend it to gamers now? Honestly, probably not. The graphics look fine but the gameplay is very repetitive, which leaves it pretty unsatisfying. But it’s not without its virtues. In fact, Video Games & Computer Entertainment awarded it Best Action Computer Game of 1992, which I certainly did not expect when I started researching this.

What do you think of Arachnophobia? And have you played the game? Let me know in the comments below, and if you have a game based on a movie you think I should play, I’d love to hear about it. 

Life is short. Spend it with the people - and the movies, and the games, that you love.