For this Predator, if it blinks we can kill it

Predator is pretty much the most obvious idea for a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game ever. It’s literally a movie about muscle-bound soldiers using 15 billion rounds of ammo to fight an invisible crab-face alien with dreadlocks. It’s pretty much a late ‘80s Nintendo game already.

The actual Predator NES game that arrived in 1989 is very unusual for a lot of different reasons. For starters, it’s basically a port of the very first Predator video game, which came out on the MSX computer platform in 1987, with only a few relatively minor changes. Secondly, it’s a game that is both atypically faithful and atypically unfaithful to its source inspiration. There are elements of the game that are so incredibly specific to the film that they almost count as proto-Easter eggs, but at the same time, the developers throw in so much random nonsense that it almost turns into a wacky parody of the Arnold movie. It’s a game that does a fantastic job of summing up the intro to the film, but as soon as the gameplay begins … you’re wearing a hot pink jumpsuit and fist fighting living boulders while aborted duck fetus aliens spit laser balls at you. Which, uh, wasn’t in the movie.

It’s so bizarre. One moment you’re jumping over scorpions and duking it out with guys who look like Apollo Creed — which are definitely direct references to the movie — and the next you have to avoid getting hit by jellyfish, killer mitochondria cells and literal freaking ghosts right out of Super Mario Bros. 3. Probably the best thing about the entire game is that the instructional manual explains away all of the non-canonical enemies as “pets” of the Predator. No, really.

The game itself is kind of a mixed bag. It’s poorly designed in a lot of ways (so much so that the developers included a self destruct button for when the game glitches out on you) but taken as a whole, it isn’t that bad, and it’s certainly not as bad as its reputed to be. It’s frustrating, for sure, but it is playable, and heaven help us, even a little fun in extremely rare occasions. It’s the epitome of an overhated NES game — I mean, it doesn’t deserve to be celebrated, but it doesn’t deserve to be condemned, either. 

For the most part the game plays out like a very watered down imitation of Contra. You begin armed with only punches, which literally do nothing against 90 percent of the enemies in the game. So you basically have to find the machine gun or laser gun power up hidden in each stage to even think about surviving. You also get grenades, which you NEED to break through certain barriers, but you really can’t aim them adequately and nine times out of ten you just end up blowing yourself up in the process. Like I said earlier, though, nobody’s going to champion this game for how well thought out its programming is. 

So you do a LOT of jumping from point A to point B, which is no simple task considering how slippery the controls are. At random intervals you’ll come face to face with the Predator, who … break dances across the screen. I don’t recall the part in the film where the Predator started doing 720 degree full rotational jumps in the air like a Power Rangers villain, but maybe they were working off an earlier draft of the script?

Every few stages the game goes into “Big Mode,” where, fittingly enough, your character turns REALLY big and super detailed. During these sections you’re pushed across the screen and have to shoot a bunch of bubbles over and over again until an equally big and super detailed Predator shows up and you have to shoot him a kazillion times until he explodes. These stretches of the game are cutting it close to impossible and if you somehow manage to beat them the game rewards you by making it an auto-checkpoint so you never have to suffer through it again. Hey, maybe these developers knew what they were doing after all?

Yeah, Predator is obviously a repetitive game. It has about 30 levels to slog through, but there are a lot of obvious warp points scattered throughout the game that at least let you leap frog over three or four of ‘em at a time. Like, even the instructional manual tells you point blank you’ll probably only see 20 or so stages, which is an admirably honest thing to put in print. Activision, you have my respect, or at least a little of it.

The entire game is surreal, but the ending is especially trippy. Once you finally make it to level 30, the ultimate confrontation isn’t even against a normal Predator, but a humongous, flying, disembodied Predator head. Like, imagine if at the end of the NES version of Batman, instead of fighting The Joker you had to dodge laser bolts fired from the eyes of a Jack Nicholson’s 20-foot-tall face. Well, that’s how this one actually ends, and it’s STILL not the most hilarious thing about the entire game. THAT honor goes to the post-battle cut scene, which does a fairly solid job of summing up how the movie actually ended. Only this time around, Arnold calls Predator “one ugly beast” instead of the far more florid and colorful term he canonically stated in the film.  And before you ask, no, we don’t get any cut scenes involving Jesse Ventura describing his love of chewing tobacco via homophobic slurs, either.

Nobody is calling this game a classic. Indeed, it’s pretty much forgotten by history altogether, which is what usually happens to licensed games like this that are mediocre to almost above average but not transcendently terrible in any capacity. Even hardcore Predator fans have to be reminded this thing exists from time to time, and those guys tend to know everything there is to possibly know about the extended Predator franchise mythos.

Really, Predator is probably worth playing simply to see how weird everything is and just how many borderline insane “creative” liberties they took with the source inspiration. Of course, we’d get many more Predator games after this one, but it still has a little charm and allure, despite all of its obvious shortcomings. 

And if you think this one is wacky, just WAIT until you see the Predator game we got on Nintendo’s Game Boy just a few years later …