While Godzilla has continued to knock it out of the park with the movies, video games have not been kind to the King of the Monsters. There seems to be a question how to properly have a game that is a true representation of Godzilla. Way back in 1986, Epyx was able to license the big green machine and create some friends for The Movie Monster Game.
Created for the Commodore 64 and the Apple II, this game was a different approach to the giant Kaijū genre. Prior games had you defending the city from the monsters. Movie gave gamers the experience that they wanted. You are the monsters, destroying different cities with different objectives. Godzilla was joined by a robot, a blob, a tarantula, a wasp and a monster who bears more then a passing resemblance to the Stay Puff Marshmallow. The cites are from the entire world, From Paris to Japan.
The purpose of this game depended on what you chose in the title selection screen. In Damage, you had to destroy as many buildings as you can. Escape forced your monster to get out of the city before they were killed by the military. The coolest one was Search where your monster had to find its child in one of the buildings. In a nod to the films, Godzilla had to find his son from the movies.
Epyx didn’t survive into the early nineties, and The Movie Monster Game is rarely discussed even within the Kaijū community. This game does have a lot of love put into it. As it was loading up, the screen would display a theater with coming attractions on it. This company saw what people wanted from giant monster games. Destroy as much as you could as fast as you could. The fact that they were able to get Godzilla shows that the company had a sound idea to present to the movie studio. It might not have been the best, but it knew it’s source material and was respectful of it.
