Movie tie-in games used to be all the rage, with everything from The Lion King to The Terminator getting game adaptations — even if they didn’t all necessarily become classics. Recent retro revivals like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have shown that licensed games can still be pretty great sometimes, and now a classic horror film is getting the double feature treatment, with two games based on John Carpenter’s Halloween currently in development.
Developer Boss Team Games announced this week that it’s working on two separate Halloween games. As IGN reports, the first is part of its new RetroRealms series, which is focused on throwback action platformers and currently has two games in the works. Alongside Halloween, Boss Team is also making Ash vs. Evil Dead, based on the TV series of the same name. The two games sport an SNES-inspired pixelated art style with fast-paced action to match. Both games launch on October 18 for $25 apiece, and buying both will unlock a crossover feature that lets you swap the games’ protagonists, Michael Myers and Ash Williams.
Boss Team’s Halloween could hardly be further from the tone of the movie it’s based on. While the Halloween series has veered hard into camp at times, the original and its most recent sequels are tense, effective horror. The Halloween game, then, seems like it’s based less on the movies themselves than on the general pop culture idea of fun ‘80s slashers, made in the same style as movie tie-ins of that era.
Both RetroRealms games look like they could be a blast, but they’re far from what I would have imagined a modern Halloween game would look like. But there’s still a chance that a game more closely tied to the original Halloween movie could be in the works — and it’s also being made by Boss Team. The developer has announced that it has two games based on Halloween in the works, and the RetroRealms version is the only one we’ve seen so far. Nothing has been confirmed yet, but there are a few hints that the project yet to be revealed could be sticking closer to its horror roots.
Before its recent announcement, Boss Team was best known for Evil Dead: The Game, an asymmetric multiplayer horror game akin to Dead by Daylight, based on the film series. While it hasn’t quite dethroned the most popular games in the genre, it received decent reviews upon release, and hews much closer to the spooky vibes of the original Evil Dead movie than the new RetroRealms series is interested in.
Given Boss Team’s history, it’s much easier to see how it could approach its other Halloween game with a similar respect for its source material. Taking another stab at an asymmetric multiplayer game might not be the way to go, but a singleplayer horror game that plays with the same kind of tension the original Halloween movie mastered feels like it could be a gift to horror fans.
Just as promising is the fact that the creator of Halloween is on board, too. According to Boss Team, director John Carpenter is “intimately involved” with its unrevealed Halloween game. That makes it sound like it’s doing more than getting the horror legend’s blessing — after all, Boss Team makes no mention of his involvement in the RetroRealms release, which could suggest that the second title will stick closer to his original vision. It’s also worth noting that Carpenter hasn’t directed a film in over a decade, primarily working as a composer since then, including on 2022’s Halloween Ends.
If there’s any chance of seeing Carpenter involved in crafting a new horror story, it’s worth holding out hope that it will at least bear some resemblance to his classic films. Until we find out for sure, there are at least two new retro platformers on the way this fall that could fill the need for spooky vibes, if not actual scares.
