Cashing In On VHS: The VCR Board Game

The VHS market brought the cinema into our living rooms en masse for the first time. It brought us the classics, the not-so classics and the outright bombs from the history of film. It also brought us the first ever programs of the direct to video market. Oh how many shitty Fred Olen Ray flicks have I seen thanks only to the humble VCR. To say that there was an onslaught of VHS titles may still be an understatement. I wonder if anyone has ever thought about the sheer volume of tapes that were released at the height of the VCR’s popularity. And sadly I also ponder how many tons of plastic now choke our landfills sharing the space with so many dead media from days gone by.

It’s with a bittersweet feeling that I finally admit to the death of VHS. How many memories I formed while watching, how many feet of tape? How many times did I borrow my sister’s copy of Ghost to “watch” with girlfriends in my room? It worked every time, if you get my meaning. Yes, how many hours of fun spent in front of the TV watching what I wanted, when I wanted. And yet still the VCR gave us more. It gave us a new way to play. Board Games, that is.

Yep, even the folks at the board game companies like Parker Brothers wanted in on the new media gold rush that was VHS. No longer were you bound to playing such classic games like “Clue” and “Candyland” around a table with a mere board, cards and dice. No my friends, now you could sit in front of the TV and play the same games with a board, cards and videotape! (Okay, some games did in fact have dice!). Yes the future was here. And the year was 1985.

My first experience with the “VCR Board Game” was in the same year. I was nine, and the game was Clue. Now in the original game, you had to move around a board deducing from “clues” left behind whodunit, where and with what object. The VCR game had a similar goal, however instead of using those Holmes-ian powers of deduction, you needed a keen visual memory. Now the clues weren’t hidden around the game board, they were on the video. Each segment of the game played out as third rate actors took the roles of our favorite Clue characters played in short “dramatic” scenes on the tape. Afterwards, you may have drawn a card that said: “the murderer was the man who was drinking the green beverage” or some such thing. Yes all you had to do was pay attention to the scene and every minute detail to deduce who the murderer was. Not quite the same game anymore, not really.

Anyway, I mention Clue to illustrate how the “mechanics” of the game operated. 1. Watch A Scene. 2. Stop the Tape. 3. Play the “game”. 4. Start the tape and watch the next scene. That four-step process sums up about 80% of the VCR game tapes I have seen. And I have seen a lot of them. Doorways To Adventure (a game that used old public domain serial films as its scene content, Clue, Clue 2, Candyland, Doorways to Horror (same as Doorways to Adventure but with PD horror film content), Wayne’s World, The Honeymooners, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Dragonquest (the entry for the Dungeons and Dragons nerds), Robocop, Wrestlemania, Commercial Crazies, Flashmatch, Pocahontas, The Three Stooges, Star Wars, California Games, Winter Olympics, NFL Quarterback, and Eyewitness Newsreel Challenge. Whew! Now these games (or at least most of them fit into the above category of “start-watch-stop-repeat” VCR games that were released. However there was also another type of game, one that took a different approach (although not MUCH different) to the way that VCR games were played.

1991 saw the release of Nightmare, a horror themed party style VHS game that, instead of having to start and stop the tape, ran free for 60 minutes. Yup, a real time analog video board game! Just make sure you have everything set up and ready to go. Once that tape stops, there’s no stopping, so make sure you’ve got a healthy supply of drink, snacks, smokes, and make sure you went to the bathroom: this game stops for NO MAN!

The game play of Nightmare is simple- on the screen is a timer that counts up to 60 minutes (although making it a countdown probably would have made it scarier!). Every once in a while this man in a cloak pops up on the screen and shouts at you and makes you do his bidding, then disappears again. This man is called the GATEKEEPER. The actor was probably some drunken bum they picked up off the street. Or at least maybe after he made this game, that’s where he ended up. Anyway, all the while the clock ticks and the players try to get to the end of the board, where they have to face their greatest fear (each player writes their fear on a game piece at the beginning of the game). Should you get to the end and draw a fear that was not your own, you’re the WINNER!

This game injected new life into the VCR game market and even spawned three sequel editions (the mummy, the zombie, the vampire). Then as the other games before it, Nightmare vanished! But wait! In its wake came Atmosfear, a retooling of the Nightmare game that had two editions: “The Harbingers” and “The Soul Rangers”. After this, no character living or undead was able to revive the market. The VCR game fell to the wayside and into obscurity… or did it?

All in all I have to say that most of these games I have played, and for the most part they were pretty fun at the time. However, since all the information was on an analog videotape, these games had little in the way of playability. Often someone would get the game, have a bunch of friends over to play, and then the game would end up in closets and garage sales. For a time they, like other gimmicky fare, had a boon in popularity, but as we know, like the oxides on the tapes themselves, everything fades away. What killed this market? Who’s to say, but I’m betting that after a while, people got tired of dropping the hefty cash (most of these games retailed for 30-50 bucks, way above normal board game prices) for a game they would most likely only play once. I know I can think of like a million other ways to dispose of my disposable income. Maybe the rise in Video Game popularity had something to do with it. After all, by the time the VCR board game met its demise we had 16-bit graphics! 16 WHOLE BITS! Take that Atari!

But I digress. Whatever the case I always thought that we would never again play games with our television like we did with VCR Board Games…that is until another market started growing…the DVD market! It seems like history is repeating itself a tad. Once more Atmosfear is on the Market as a DVD game. There are DVD editions of Trivial Pursuit and movie DVD games like Scene It. Take a stroll through your local toy store’s game section and you’ll see what I’m on about. It is happening again, all thanks to the movers and shakers that made the VCR possible. So 20 years from now, when you’re playing the media board game edition of your favorite licensed characters on your compact Blu-ray micro HD DVD player, think about where it started. Then hope the damn thing’s recyclable because God knows our landfills can’t take anymore of this crap.

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Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #19 (the ever-popular VHS RIP issue).