The Addams Family

The Game

Licensed platformers are the background radiation of the SNES library, and most of them are exactly what you expect. The Addams Family is not. Ocean built it as a single connected mansion — a hub you wander, with wings and floors that unlock as you find your way in — rather than a menu of levels. You play Gomez, looking for the rest of the family, and the game largely trusts you to work out where to go.

That trust is also the problem. There is no map. There are no directions worth the name. The mansion loops back on itself in ways that are genuinely clever once you have it in your head, and genuinely maddening for the several hours before that. Combine it with a finite stock of lives and you get a game that punishes exploration, which is an odd thing for an exploration game to do.

What holds up is the craft. The animation has real character, the mansion has a consistent visual logic to it, and the controls are precise enough that deaths feel earned rather than arbitrary. Ocean clearly cared.

Box art

Notes on the box art to follow.

The People

Ocean Software, out of Manchester, were one of the biggest names in European games in this period, and film licences were a large part of how they got there. Their reputation was mixed for exactly the reason all licence houses' were — the deadline is the release date of the film, not the date the game is ready.

This one lands on the better end of their output, which is worth saying out loud given how much Ocean-bashing became reflexive later.

Notes for expansion: track down the specific development team credits, and compare against the Amiga and Mega Drive versions, which are different games rather than ports.

The Press

To be filled in from contemporary magazines — this one was reviewed widely in the UK press given Ocean's profile.

Screenshots

Screenshots to follow.