Such Wonderful Toys: The (Surprisingly Good) Video Games Based on Tim Burton Films
Before deciding to finish his career directing live-action adaptations of classic Disney cartoons, Tim Burton was one of the most visionary filmmakers of the 80s and 90s. The video games inspired by his colorful, vivid worlds were often a cut above the typical licensed fare found on consoles. Sadly, we never got a Mars Attacks! shooter or Ed Wood role-playing game, but I thought it’d still be fun to examine Tim Burton’s filmography, as seen through the video games it inspired.
Beetlejuice (1988)
I could be sneaky and tell you that before they made Donkey Kong Country or Banjo Kazooie, the folks at Rare adapted this Tim Burton classic into a platformer on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Cool, huh? And completely true!
But that would be masking that, at this point, Rare was making a dozen games a year — many of them forgettable. Beetlejuice is more from the makers of John Elway’s Quarterback and Wheel of Fortune: Junior Edition than it is from the people that brought you Perfect Dark and Sea of Thieves.
With that in mind, this side-scrolling game could’ve been better, but it could’ve been much worse. There’s cool music. You can tell what you’re supposed to be doing, for the most part. I’m a fan of those things. Beetlejuice seems like he’s got a real floaty jump — but I can’t recall his jump from the movie very well, so I won’t comment on that any further.
He also has a very futile kick that takes up half of the buttons, which I found to be wildly ineffective when trying to deal with the bugs that came up to my waist.
There’s a fun mix of levels and weapons, although the latter is hindered by navigating your inventory with two buttons. Again, they gave a whole button to a stomp that doesn’t do anything. A whole button in 1988! Are you mad?!
Ultimately, it’s a hodgepodge of bizarre images and pleasing sounds — not unlike my vague recollection of the source material that I haven’t seen in a while.
Batman: The Video Game (1989)
Burton’s Batman film was perhaps the biggest of the decade, so of course there were a few different video game adaptations. The NES version is a classic, although not a very sound representation of the movie. Still, Batman comes out swinging here on his Nintendo debut.
He also comes out shooting. He has a gun of some sort. Obviously, it might be a grappling hook or something, but I don’t know. I shot a lot of people with it. Also, it shoots little rockets, not like, grappling hooks and whatnot. So that’s interesting.