Developed/Published by: Unknown / Tandy
Released: 1982
Completed: 02/10/2025
Completion: Well… I saw all three levels.

It’s October, which means it’s a time of spooks, Draculas, werewolves, and finally getting to wear that light coat you love. Since writing about Castlevania, I thought it might be fun to spend the rest of October with a bit more of a focus on the Halloween season the way I do for Christmas, but I was quickly struck by a key difference between the seasons: in the Christmas season, everything “Christmassy” actively relates to, or features, Christmas. A “Christmas movie” has Christmas in it–even if it’s completely tangential to the plot, it’s at the very least set during the season. But during the Halloween season, we really don’t need everything to relate directly to Halloween. Sure there’s your, well, Halloweens, your Ernest Scared Stupids, but no one is making a case that you include films that just happen to feature Halloween as “the best Halloween movie” that everyone should watch every year–well, unless there’s someone out there with Die Hard-like passion for Marriage Story, or something.

What we instead require is that our Halloween content be, well, scary. Or at least a little unsettling. So it felt like it wouldn’t really make sense for me to limit anything I played this month to things that were directly Halloweeny, and instead just nose around the horror genre and pull up anything I found interesting or surprising. Which is how I ended up playing Poltergeist for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

I’ll be honest–I know absolutely nothing about the TRS-80 Color Computer. In fact, I assumed it was a version of the TRS-80, which would make sense, but it’s actually a completely different system. So it’s not the system that made me think to boot up Poltergeist. I decided to look at it because I think like many people, I particularly associate this season with horror movies, and it just seemed utterly surprising to see that one of the biggest films of 1982–directed by Tobe Hooper, produced by Steven Spielberg–somehow had a game exclusive for a computer that, at this point, is pretty poorly remembered. 

It gets even more surprising when you consider that 1982 is pretty much ground zero for the movie tie-in. Sure, there have been licensed games before–read all about Superman in exp. 2602!–but in 1982 suddenly movie tie-ins, and Spielberg tie-ins specifically, become big business, with Raiders Of The Lost Ark and (unfortunately) E.T. showing up.

It wasn’t just Spielberg getting in on the action: we’ve got The Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600, Star Trek: The Motion Picture for Vectrex, multiple Tron games, even an adaptation of Fantastic Voyage, a movie from 1966! Poltergeist really is an outlier, however, by being released on a home computer where the market lent far more hobbyist. The TRS-80 Color Computer–known fondly as the CoCo–would eventually be popular enough to have several magazines that covered it, but at the time of Poltergeist’s release only The Rainbow would exist, and it really wasn’t much more than a fanzine (no shade!)

I can’t find anything about Poltergeist in it, or anywhere else, so the game, outside of my direct experience of it, is a bit of a mystery. What I do know is the game is an early example (maybe the earliest) of the bread-and-butter of the movie tie-in: the “each level is a minigame that reflects something you know from the film” thing that most famously Ocean Software would run into the ground.

On the first level, you’re running around what looks like a Mondrian but its actually a suburb, with the goal of collecting the things that will allow you to rescue Carol Anne (sorry, I didn’t go over the plot of Poltergeist: a wee lassie gets sucked into a telly and she needs to be rescued. There.) It would be over-selling this segment to call it a maze game–it’s no Pac-Man, not even Head On, as you run around the grid avoiding cars by ducking into driveways to grab items like towels that maybe have some importance in the film (can’t remember.) I suppose it’s the early 80s so there aren’t speedbumps and signs saying “Twenty’s Plenty” everywhere, because every car is going maximum speed and will kill you, which, I mean, I think I’d probably want to move out even if there weren’t ghosts. Especially with a madman running around stealing very ordinary items from people’s houses.

Thankfully, if you just hold down the fire button when the level loads and keep holding it the cars never spawn–up to you if you want to abuse it, but it can be quite annoying to get killed by a car because you have to go near the edge of the screen.

The second level is sort of a Frogger-a-like, where you (some disembodied footprints) have go up the stairs, avoiding, uh, holes, pretzels(?) and the poltergeist itself, which makes a direct line for you. You basically just have to roast it up the stairs, and be lucky–you can’t hang around waiting for the right opening.

The third level is… confusing. Is it supposed to maybe represent, like, flying through the television? (It’s just described as an “energy field” in the manual.) Faces fly towards you that you have to shoot before they pass you using an annoying gunsight that fights you, and that you can’t shoot too early because one of them will be Carol Anne (represented by a wee stick figure) who you obviously can’t shoot. And that’s it.

This is, obviously, rubbish. And barely representative of the thing it’s based on. I suppose we could be impressed by the last level, but it’s barely the level of Starship on the Atari 2600, and close to impossible (for the amount of effort I wanted to put in, anyway.) I find it really hard to believe this could have entertained anyone for very long at all–and if you do get good enough to finish the third level (something it looks like only one person on Youtube has ever managed) all you get is a bit of text saying the house is clean–which is at least a direct reference to the film, I suppose.

Poltergeist feels like a film that if you were going to adapt it you’d rather do something like a text adventure in the era, but it does seem (from my little research) that games on the CoCo tended towards arcade experiences, which probably explains why this is what it is. I suspect, also, that each level is just whatever the programmer had lying around that they’d been noodling on with the explanation bolted on after. I can’t imagine Spielberg was too impressed–if he ever saw this–and to be fair, neither am I.

Will I ever play it again? My promise to you: I’ll boot this up if I’m ever hanging out with Steven Spielberg.

Final Thought: Weirdly the era was not just Spielberg adaptation heavy but Hooper-heavy, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre showing up on Atari 2600 within months!