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The 1987 movie Predator seemed destined to become a great game. It had plenty of action, the coolest film alien since, well... the Alien, and it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, the star of the earlier films The Terminator, The Running Man, Conan The Barbarian and Commando. How could this not make a great game? It would take someone seriously incompetent to screw this one up.

Enter Activision, makers of such great games as Pitfall!, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, H.E.R.O. and Megamania. They were awarded the license to release Predator for the NES. Now it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the cash to roll in, because with that track record, how could Activision go wrong? Predator was going to be great!

The funny thing is... it all went to hell.

What the suits neglected to take into consideration was that the aforementioned games had come years earlier, during the heyday of the Atari 2600 - when Activision had some of their best and brightest programmers working for them. By 1987, most of them were gone - several of them left and formed their own software company, Absolute Entertainment. Activision ended up licensing games created for the Famicom and also started farming out development on some of their initial NES games to outside companies - which was a big mistake. In probably the most infamous instance of Activision's outside licensing going bad, they hired Pony Canyon to create the joke of a game Super Pitfall, which was a disgrace to the name of Pitfall.

Activision also released a version of Ghostbusters (whether it was developed by another company for Activision or not I'm not sure of) for the NES during that time - which despite having been a great game three years earlier when it had shown up on the 2600 and most home computers, was not quite the game on the NES as it could have been. Needless to say, Activision had come a long way since the glory days of the early '80s - and when the NES version of Predator finally hit, it drove that point home. It wasn't until the mid '90s that Activision began to resemble their former selves (and started licensing good games, like Tenchu: Stealth Assassins).

But yeah, Predator. Activision had licensed it from Pack-In-Video - the same company that created the infamous shooter Deep Blue for the PC Engine two years later. That was a bad sign to begin with, although it's still not clear whether Activision just licensed one of Pack-In-Video's existing Famicom games and slapped the Predator license and characters on it, or if Pack-In-Video had actually created the game with the Predator license for the Famicom. The second sign that this game was in trouble was when we got our first look at the in-game Arnold sprite. On the title screen, he looked fine - there was a great picture of Arnold as Major Dutch Schaefer, the hero of the film. It had to have been taken right from the publicity photos for the movie. But upon actually starting to play the game, the first thing noticable about Arnold was that he was wearing pink pants and go-go boots!

Pink pants and go-go boots?!? WTF?!?

As if that wasn't enough, aside from the occasional commando, Arnold had to fight things that weren't in the movie, and never could have been in the movie. Now I understand that a lot of games based on movies have enemies and items that weren't in the original film, but Predator took that idea to a new high. Rejected slimes from The Legend Of Zelda, strange crustaceans, mortar-firing plants, giant amoebas, strange winged running creatures... Arnold has to fight all of these in the NES game. On top of that, the one Predator in the film multiplied into about 20 or 30 near identical Predators. And as if it wan't enough that you had to fight all of these Predators, the last boss was a giant, floating Predator head!

The controls were a pain too. Precision jumping is a must in Predator. Trust me - I'm the only person that I know that actually finished the game, so I know. Of course, this was in 1990, when I had a whole lot of free time on my hands. There are a lot of bottomless pits in Predator, and more often than not, Arnold would plummet to his death - all because of bad controls... and let's not even talk about that godforsaken big mode. Of course, that doesn't mean that everything in the game is horrible. The music is pretty good, and the cinema scenes are extremely well done - even the scene showing the skinned U.S. soldiers hanging upside down from a tree is intact. Unfortunately, those alone aren't enough to save Predator.

There are a lot of arguments against turning movies into games, and Predator is a perfect game to use to support that argument. After all, it's a prime example of how not to do a movie based game (also see the NES game Total Recall for another fine example of how not to do a movie based game). It's a real shame too, because Predator could have been a great game. Too bad things went the way they did...