I was sitting in front of my computer trying to come up with a suitably awful subject for this week’s column, and my mind started wandering to games I played when I was younger–specifically, my Atari 2600 collection. I amassed a considerable collection of carts for my system over the course of visiting many yard sales during the summer months, where it was not uncommon to find people selling off their old Atari games for a buck a shot. Naturally there were more crap 2600 carts than gold, so for every Choplifter or Pitfall, I wound up with five or six turds. Most commonly those turds wound up being games licensed from other properties: G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike and Star Wars: Jedi Arena spring readily to mind. I was getting ready to grab one of these low-hanging dingleberries when I remembered one other game I took a chance on which wound up being one of my all-time favorites for the system: 20th Century Fox’s Fantastic Voyage.

Converting most movies or books to a gaming platform isn’t easy, but the less technological power you have the more difficult it becomes to match a given story’s premise. But this 1966 sci-fi film starring Donald Pleasence, Raquel Welch, and Stephen Boyd has a plot tailor-made for translation into a fun game no matter what system you’re making it for. A group of three men and one woman along with a specially-designed naval submarine are miniaturized so they can be injected into another man, a scientist defecting from behind the Iron Curtain. Their job is to travel through his body to locate and destroy a blood clot in his brain. Standard surgery is not an option: the clot is located in an area of the brain inoperable by 1960s medical standards. Either the team succeeds, or the patient dies.

Of course this wouldn’t be a thriller if there wasn’t some danger involved. The technology involved to shrink the sub and the team is unstable: once micro-sized, they have exactly sixty minutes to navigate the body, find the clot, destroy it, and then exit the man’s body before the process begins to reverse itself. And if that happens while they’re still inside…well, some visual aids we just can’t post on this site so use your imagination, you sickos.

Fantastic Voyage on the 2600 has to strip out the dramatic elements of the film in order to focus on the gameplay, but the result is extraordinarily fun. Like The Empire Strikes Back concentrated solely on the battle with the Imperial Walkers on Hoth for its home conversion, the game deals exclusively with the submarine’s navigation of the various internal organs and blood vessels of the human body.

Unlike most shooters, Fantastic Voyage doesn’t have lives or a shield meter. Instead you’re playing against time and the defenses of the body itself. Your sub is a tough little bugger, so it can withstand the pressures of combat inside the blood vessels. Unfortunately the subject is a different story: a heart rate monitor at the bottom of the screen tells the story of the patient’s overall health. The slower it beats, the better you’re doing. Things like running into the arterial walls or wantonly destroying beneficial red blood cells increase the heart rate, as will leaving live bacteria in the patient’s bloodstream. Crashing into things with your sub also has a negative effect, so good steering is a must (and if you somehow run your sub into the big blood clot at the end of the stage it’s an instant game over). You’re on a time crunch, so it’s in your best interest to navigate the inner space of your patient quickly as well as safely.

Most of Fantastic Voyage‘s initial difficulty curve comes from curbing your enthusiasm on the fire button as you figure out which objects are safe to shoot, which should be left alone, and what can’t be destroyed. After that, it’s just the length of the stages and the narrowing passages which conspire to halt your mission prematurely. Like most games of the time, Fantastic Voyage has no ending: the stages simply progress in length and difficulty until your game ends via patient death.

While it obviously lacks the character-driven drama of the film upon which its based, there’s no denying Fantastic Voyage is a prime example of a licensed game done right. By today’s standards it’s as repetitive as Carlos Mencia’s “comedy”, but you’ve got to admit when it comes down to it, David Lubar programmed a brilliantly-designed, fun-as-all-hell game which starts off simple and escalates to “holy shit” levels in a matter of minutes; even veteran players have a hard time saving more than three patients on the standard game settings. Now that is how you create a licensed video game!

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


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