GHOSTS 'N GOBLINS
THE GAME THAT LEFT YOU IN YOUR UNDERPANTS BEFORE IT KILLED YOU

► THE ARCADE THAT DEVOURED YOUR POCKET MONEY

Raise your hand if you ever stood watching someone else play an arcade cabinet — not because it was your turn, but because the game that bloke was playing was the most captivating thing in the entire hall. That game, on many afternoons throughout the eighties in arcades across Britain and beyond, was Ghosts 'N Goblins.

It was different. While other arcades put you inside a spaceship or sent you running across a static screen, Capcom in 1985 had done something nobody had seen before: a knight in armour, a graveyard at night, zombies clawing out of the earth, and the princess who always gets kidnapped because princesses apparently have a special talent for getting into trouble. It was dark, it was difficult, it was visually spectacular for its time. And when in 1986 Elite Systems announced they were bringing it to the Commodore 64, the question wasn't whether you'd buy it. The question was how quickly it would make you throw the joystick across the room.

► CAPCOM, 1985: WHEN FUJIWARA DESIGNED A GAME TO MAKE YOU SUFFER IN STYLE

A bit of history is needed here, because the origin of Ghosts 'N Goblins is as fascinating as the game itself. The man behind the design was Tokuro Fujiwara, a Capcom designer with a very specific philosophy: games should be difficult so that completing them actually meant something. Not randomly difficult — deliberately, almost surgically difficult. Every death should teach you something. The frustration was part of the learning.

Fujiwara achieved this with a mechanic that, in retrospect, was almost poetic in its cruelty: the protagonist, a knight named Arthur, wore his armour as his first line of defence. One enemy hit and the armour flew off, leaving poor Arthur sprinting between demons in nothing but his white underpants. In his underpants. This was no minor detail — it was the emotional core of the game. The image of a knight in his pants hurling lances at zombies is one of the most memorable sights of the eighties. And when the second hit landed, there were no underpants left. Just a pile of bones — the game's way of saying: "Try again, brave soul."

► CHRIS BUTLER: THE MAN WHO CRAMMED AN ARCADE INTO 64 KILOBYTES

Porting a Capcom arcade to a home computer in 1986 was no small feat. The hardware inside those arcade cabinets was infinitely more powerful than a Commodore 64, and making the result playable, presentable and recognisable required genuine talent. Elite Systems entrusted the job to one man: Chris Butler.

Butler did the programming and the graphics entirely on his own. The game's title screen makes it unambiguous: "Programming by Chris Butler. Graphics by Chris Butler." All that was missing was "and he nipped out for the milk as well" — he basically did the entire thing. Sound effects were handled by Mark Cooksey, one of the most prolific SID composers of the era, whose music you can hear in the player on this review (if you haven't hit play yet, do it now — you're wasting your time without it).

The result was a conversion that received excellent reviews in 1986. It wasn't the original arcade pixel for pixel — that was impossible — but it was Ghosts 'N Goblins. Recognisable, playable, genuinely tense in all the right moments, with that night-graveyard atmosphere that made playing in the dark with the lights off an experience your parents probably would have banned if they'd known what you were actually doing.

► SCREENSHOT GALLERY

📷 In underpants or in armour, Arthur had to reach the final castle. Spoiler: he got there in his underpants.

► THE ARMOUR, THE UNDERPANTS AND THE PILE OF BONES: THE GAME'S HOLY TRINITY

Talking about Ghosts 'N Goblins without talking about its damage system is like talking about football without mentioning the ball. The mechanic had a brutal elegance: Arthur started in his silver armour, which was essentially his health bar. One hit = down to his underpants. Second hit = pile of bones. Game over, next life.

Without his armour, Arthur was just as fast and could throw just as well, but the psychological sensation of playing in your pants was completely different. Suddenly every zombie, every crow, every flying fireball was an immediate existential threat. You moved the joystick more carefully. You tried to calculate distances. You became a more conservative player. And just at that moment the game would send a bat from above and kill you anyway, because that's what Fujiwara was there for.

The bones, incidentally, were genuinely funny. The fact that a 1986 video game had built-in dark humour in its death mechanic was something that we, as kids of the eighties, found absolutely brilliant. Dying in other games was frustrating. Dying in Ghosts 'N Goblins and seeing Arthur reduced to a little pile of bones had something involuntarily comic about it that made the tragedy more bearable. And there was plenty of tragedy, because you were going to die. A lot.

► THE C64 CONVERSION: A GRAVEYARD THAT WORKED

The Commodore 64 version of Ghosts 'N Goblins had its differences from the arcade. That was inevitable. But Chris Butler made the right calls about what to keep and what to sacrifice. The levels were there, the feeling of dread was there, the armour-underpants-bones system was there. The graphics were simpler than the original arcade, but they had personality and were perfectly recognisable.

The zombies clawed out of the ground with that characteristic movement that put you on edge the moment you saw them. The red demons flew with their unpredictable trajectories. The lances had that arc that needed practice to master. And the timer — that clock ticking remorselessly in the top corner — reminded you that you couldn't stop to calculate the perfect move. You had to keep moving. Always forward. Scared, but forward.

Cooksey's SID chip did the rest. The music of Ghosts 'N Goblins on C64 is one of those melodies that moves into your brain and refuses to leave. It has that obsessive quality, that loop that never quite resolves its tension, that urgency that crawls in through your ears and tells you not to stop. If you grew up with this game, that melody is playing in your head right now even if you haven't pressed play. You know it perfectly well.

► THE DIFFICULTY: AN ART FORM IN ITSELF

Let's be honest: Ghosts 'N Goblins was hard. Very hard. There was something almost philosophical about how the game handled difficulty. It wasn't hard because the controls were broken or because the game was technically unfair. It was hard because the level design was relentless: always one more enemy, always from the angle you least expected, always at the exact moment when you'd lost your armour.

In the school playground there were two types of people: those who had reached the second level, and those who lied about having reached the second level. Getting to the third level was an achievement that gave you storytelling authority for the rest of the term. And if someone claimed they'd seen the ending, they were regarded with the same mix of admiration and scepticism as someone who claims to have seen a UFO.

► THE LEGACY: WHY GHOSTS 'N GOBLINS MATTERS MORE THAN IT SEEMS

With nearly forty years of perspective, Ghosts 'N Goblins carries an importance that goes well beyond being a solid, difficult game from the eighties. It was one of the first action arcades to have a genuine atmosphere. It wasn't simply "eliminate enemies and rack up points." There was a story, however simple. There was a coherent world with its own logic of lighthearted terror. There was a protagonist with his own name, and a way of dying that made you laugh and wince in equal measure.

Capcom learned from this game. Fujiwara went on to work on sequels and what would eventually become the Maximo franchise years later. The armour mechanic influenced dozens of designers who followed. And the idea of a game that demands two full playthroughs to see the real ending was so ahead of its time that game design courses today cite it as a pioneer of what we now call New Game Plus.

The C64 version was the one most of us played. Not the arcade cabinet — because even if the machine was in the corner of a local chip shop, your coins ran out fast — but the cassette you loaded on the datasette and prayed wouldn't give a read error at minute four. That was ours. And it was good. It was very good.