I mention it often, but fans continue doing things game publishers just did not do, whether due to money or market conditions. Doesn’t matter, they didn’t do it and fans are. Take Ghosts N Goblins for instance, this is a title that only found one console home and that was the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was ported to various computers though, I separate them out as most people view the computer market as different from consoles for some reason. Anyhow, fans are working on creating a port of Ghosts N Goblins for the Atari 7800. Oddly, this could have been something Capcom, or Atari, could have done back in the day.
While Nintendo had restrictive contracts in place that stifled competition with other consoles, that did not apply to companies licensing arcade games. This is why we got cross platform games such as Strider on Genesis (much closer to the arcade than the horrible NES port) and Commando (a Capcom title that hit both the NES and Atari 7800). This magic was possible because the licensing company had to get the port programmed by someone other than the NES licensee, just to be safe, I am sure, and someone else had to publish it. Commando on Atari 7800 was programmed by Sculptured Software for instance. Commando came out in arcades in 1989, a long time after Ghosts N Goblins landed.
You may recognize Sculptured Software for the Super NES game, Super Star Wars, they handled the SNES port of Mortal Kombat and they also did the Doom port to SNES among many other releases.
Interestingly, the Atari 7800 came out nationwide in 1986. While there was a soft launch a couple years prior, it went nowhere before financials within Atari Corp. went awry.Ghosts N Golbins came out in 1985 and could have easily been a launch, or close to it, release. Another fumble by Atari to say the least.
Check out the video above, this is rather impressive. Sure, it falls short of the arcade original, so did the Nintendo Entertainment System version. Metal Mauler Gaming are working on this port to the Atari 7800 console.
Taking a closer look we can see crisp animations, many of the familiar enemies already programmed in, and the less is more graphic trick. By not using black in some of the sprites and using the background for that, some processing power can be saved for other parts. It probably also saves some memory and less coding.
I am not a programmer, nor do I pretend to be.
What I see here is an impressive work in progress port of an arcade game that sucked a few bucks out of my pocket before I walked away. I know there are lots of fans of these throw your controller hard type games, for them, here you go. The Atari 7800 is eventually going to be home to a port of Ghosts N Goblins.
I do wish they did not use a smoothing filter on the graphics so we could enjoy all the pixels that are surely there. Pixel art is often very pretty, why hide it?
Source: YouTube
