This piece draws a lot on a piece from the website “Daily Grindhouse” written by Paul Freitag-Frey. This history of the game draws on interviews with Brian F. Colin and most of the historical information was taken from there.
However for whatever reason, the original URL had some questionable pop-ups that seemed an bit scammy so I am enclosing an archive.ph link instead here . Follow Freitag-Frey at Bluesky at the following link dekkoparsnip blue sky
Here’s the piece
My friend and I saw “The Specter Files: Deathstalker” at the Galloping Ghost arcade in Brookfield, IL. From what I remember, the cabinet was made of painted wood and had three large colored buttons. We played with it for a bit, but I quickly lost interest.
One of my problems was my ADHD (I put in the mention of it to please my mother who is my only paid subscriber.) I was in Galloping Ghost, the huge vintage arcade in Chicago’s Southwest Suburbs, there are such a rich variety of historic game cabinets. It’s hard to focus on something when everything around you is incredible.
It didn’t help that the cabinet of “The Specter Files: Deathstalker” was next to “Bust-A-Move". The loud sound effects, music and enthusiasm of the much younger players playing the puzzle game drowned out “The Specter Files”. But nevertheless, something about “The Specter Files” stuck with me and I recently decided to write about it.
One reason is even from the small amount of footage I saw, the Chicago accents stood out to me. As I’ve grown older, anything from the Chicago I grew up in fascinates me. And along with the Chicago feeling, was a dingy charm that made me think of both Svengoolie and the Bijou Theatre.
I had somehow picked up that it was almost “lost media’, perhaps from a sticker on the cabinet. And something that was almost lost has a certain tantalizing obscurity to it.
Despite its obscurity and shoestring budget, “The Specter Files” was not an amateur production. It was created by Brian F. Collin, the creator of games such as “Rampage”, “General Chaos” and “Archrivals” for Chicago-based Midway games.
But some of the ropiness of the final product can be explained that everyone involved was attempting something completely new. Collin, who had some experience as an animator, was experimenting before his future successes. While he had made other movies, he and Midway Games were trying to capitalize on the emerging field of Full Motion Video laserdisc games. This meant a lot of experimentation as the genre barely existed.
While Full Motion Video is associated with a 90’s PC genre that never really took off, its roots extend to the laserdisc era of gaming where the success of “Dragon’s Lair” created a sensation. The brief hope that laserdisc games would revitalize the flailing arcade industry of the early 1980’s. Midway and many other developers were rushing to try the new technology and the brief craze created many truly baffling games.
Ultimately the technology of Full Motion Video (especially on Laserdisc) was not only cost-prohibitive to implement, it also didn’t make for interesting games. This was mostly due to technical limitations. Until recently, you could show a state-of-the-art video production on a gaming system but due to the hardware, it would use all the possible memory. So usually what was going on behind the scenes was primitive. While a game like “Dragon’s Lair” could show you beautifully animated deaths by Don Bluth, the actual gameplay was basically hitting a button at the correct time with no real flexibility of interaction.
It wasn’t until the late 90’s that the technology could incorporate live video events into gameplay but even at that point it was becoming apparent that 3d graphics would be the future of gaming. FMV had really been an odd tangent in the story of gaming, but it was one that still fascinates many.
But at the point the game was being envisioned, it seemed to be a strong way for the industry to make a comeback. In 1985, Colin filmed “The Specter Files” on 16mm, shooting with amateur actors in an abandoned nursing home on the north side of Chicago. Despite putting together a workable product, Midway Games ended up not releasing the game as they had made the poor decision into using an alternate format (the videodisc) which ended up making mass production overly expensive. This was typical of the poor financial decisions Midway often made.
https://archive.ph/HAxXW
Brian Colin fortunately kept the footage of the game, but he was busy making Rampage and other arcade classics. In 2007, the youtube channel Goblin Bob posted a music video that Colin had compiled out of footage from “The Specter Files” over soundtrack by Trianon (a local Chicago band that was friends with Colin and did most of the music for the original game).
Whether it was from 12,000 views the video received, or that Colin was thinking of going into indie publishing, he started to talk about the game being released as an interactive DVD. Doc Mack of Galloping Ghost Arcade was at the time thinking of developing games and worked with Collin to assemble the footage into a playable game.
A cabinet was manufactured for Galloping Ghost Arcade, and later the company sold others to other vintage arcades. Eventually, as a joint venture of Game Refuge (Collin’s company) and Galloping Ghost, the game was put out on Steam.
Sadly, it seems that the venture was not an entirely successful one; both Game Refuge and Galloping Ghost have no other releases on Steam. And when I first purchased the game on my steam deck, it wasn’t entirely working on the Linux interface, there seems to have been a paucity of support after the fact as well as a fraying relationship between Game Refuge and Galloping Ghost.
This is unfortunate because I would love to see a rerelease of more Colin games as well as Galloping Ghost curating their more esoteric arcade titles on Steam. Perhaps, we will have to be content with this singularly weird release.
In terms of a game, “The Specter Files: Deathstalker” is a strikingly weird experience and has the rudimentary gameplay expected from an early laserdisc game. You play the dopey private detective, Ed Specter who talks tough but with the cadence of a nerd. You enter the DerHatchett institute in search of a missing blonde and encounter various monsters. Your only option is by making a quick choice out of three options.
The game is definitely ambitious. There are many paths the story can take and even a sort of inventory system.
But as I’ve suggested, discussing this game in terms of mechanics is limited as “The Specter Files: Deathstalker” is rudimentary at that level. Even as a “choose your own adventure”, you’re not really given much to work with. While the options on screen change the outcome more than you might expect, they are often not very descriptive of what is going to happen.
On one occasion Specter peeks into a room and sees a vampire. The options you see on screen are” 1.Confront her, 2.Hide and peek, 3.Hide and squeak”. Eventually through the process of elimination, I figured out the final option was correct but even then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Sometimes, you are given specific directions on screen, e.g.; “there was a green door to my left.". The problem is that the onscreen text will say something entirely different, “continue down the hall” or “pick a room at random” or “explore the basement” without referring to the directions the voiceover had just stated. At the same time, the captions add to the odd atmosphere of the game with their odd, antiquated vernacular.
“The Specter Files” grips you as a lost artifact of an alternate gaming history. Much like Atari’s Vector graphics arcade game “I Robot”, “The Specter Files” suggest an alternate past. Unlike “I, Robot” it isn’t an entirely successful vision that was too ahead of its time. It is a mixed success, but it still fascinates with it’s cheap and squalid nature.
FMV games are perhaps the closest thing video games get to something “so bad, it’s good”, this is because they are filmic. Usually, bad video games are unpleasantly bad, they are janky and unfun to play. FMV games have some gameplay but the parts that are usually held up as camp are the cutscenes that advance the story.
But unlike more accidentally funny FMV games, “The Specter Files” is very aware of its pastiche of B-movies. In this pastiche, there is that special quality that has been lost in modern day horror fans, who are unaware of the horror films of the 30’s and 40’s as well as the Universal monsters. I’m not sure why and maybe it’s just spending my childhood fascinated by these kinds of monsters but there’s something I love when creators attempt to draw on Dracula, Frankenstein or the mummy.
“The Specter Files” is a bit heavy-handed in its attempt to make fun of horror tropes. In its effort to not take itself seriously, it's something like another Chicago product “Svengoolie”. Comedian Rich Koz took on the tradition of a horror host originally as “Son of Svengoolie” following in the footsteps of the original Svengoolie. I never saw the original Svengoolie (except in short clips) but Koz assumed the cringy anti-humor of the original.
I used to hate Svengoolie as a young horror fan as I was fairly humorless about the genre. Now he’s a lasting institution and if he’s still not actually funny, there is something funny about the determined way he’s stuck to his painful brand of humor. And no Chicagoan can deny the iconicness of the sample of a chorus of midwestern voices droning “Berwyn” whenever that suburb is mentioned.
“The Specter Files” shares this brand of camp. Colin knew that playing the whole thing off as a joke would probably work better given the limited resources of the whole effort.
Oddly enough though, despite the humor there is something unsettling about “The Specter Files” as well. The monsters are all people wearing monster masks, probably expensive ones, but not even makeup which might be more frightening on camera. There is a feel of the uncanny, seeing blank eyes gazing threateningly at you from behind a rubber mask.
A lot of moments are unintentionally funny such as the zombie butler who wears mom jeans under his blazer. But there are an equal number of moments that are effectively creepy while never rising to the level of actually scaring you.
There is a scene with a she-wolf approaching you for a kiss, where the actor’s eyes are replaced with red dots accompanied by a synthesized sting that is quite effective. An intellectual character turning away from you and turning around as a werewolf is also well-done.
There’s also an uneasiness of tone that adds to the player’s discomfort. When one of the lunatics hits you with a rolling pin, the game attempts to soft-pedal the violence with a slapstick tone. But there’s something about the exaggerated crashing cymbals and slide whistle, that makes the violence more jolting. Maybe not as disturbing as a “Three Stooges” short but still off-putting in an interesting way.
Adding to this, is a disconnect in the spoken dialogue. The game often slips unevenly between dialogue recorded on location and dialogue that was ADRed in later, so it’s sometimes difficult to tell if the actors we are seeing are providing their own voices.
Some of the actors are quite fun although stretched a bit thin, playing multiple roles. Particularly great is a slight actor who plays a burly hunchback, He is given fake eyebrows and some white powder in his hair. There is nothing about him which suggests physical menace but it’s not for want of trying on his part.
In one of his scenes, you stumble upon him in the basement digging. The low budget is suggested again when the actor smiles sheepishly and covers his eyes from being blinded by a flashlight. Obviously, there was no budget for retakes. But the performance is campy fun, he bellows “I’ve told the Count of your arrival, He insists on having you for dinner” and then chortles meatily.
But not letting him go to waste, the game has you encounter the hunchback three different times. Once he tries to hang you, once he attacks you with a shovel on the stairs and he also sneaks up on you in the basement if you try to slip by him.
Also overutilized is a burly actor playing a lunatic who is hanging out with his dead mother and ventriloquizing on her behalf. The character seems like a vaudeville Norman Bates. This actor has a cartoonish delivery, ably switching between two voices in a schizophrenic dialogue. You later encounter him in drag in the kitchen where he screeches at you, “There’s no room service so get it yourself.”
Several other interesting performers, such as a beautiful fortune teller and a blonde vampire are only in one scene. I’m guessing the production could only afford them to play a tiny role. Another vampire you encounter a few times, a young woman with a killer mullet, apparently was a programmer at Midway at the time.
Colin himself plays a captive hippie that Specter describes in the narration as “an obnoxious jerk” and is given some of the funnier lines such as “Hey man, there’s something in here that smells worse than I do.” When asked about a shelf with magic potions on it he responds “I wouldn’t be messing around with weird chemicals like that, could be bad for your karma”
One of the worst looking masks is used on the climatic villain the Count Grischnak , who wears a skull-mask with rubber teeth. I’ve always disliked masks with teeth because rubber never looks like the right texture for teeth. You’re also likely to see the scenes with Grischnak the most as you encounter him whether you win or lose the game.
Specter kind of fails forward throughout the game. In the end after vanquishing Count Grischnak, you get decked by your secretary for sneaking up on her. She then tells you the missing girl you’ve been looking for was in her own room the whole time. Her parents just forgot to check there!!! At which point, Specter collapses like a character receiving a punchline in a Bazooka Joe comic strip.
I’ve often complained about horror-comedies that most of them suffer from the curse of being neither scary nor funny. You could make such a charge at “Deathstalker: The Specter Files” but that would be untrue because it would reducing the mixed feelings one has at the end of the game.
As I’ve perhaps failed to convey, there is something unsettling about the dingy weirdness of the whole enterprise, perhaps made creepier by the fact that it tries so hard to be funny and fails. “The Specter Files” captures a mood that is sometimes irritating, sometimes funny and sometimes unsettling but always uniquely its own.