Moonwalker

There are licensed games that use a famous name as a shortcut past the need for actual ideas. Moonwalker for MS-DOS is one of them, and it doesn't even try to hide it.

Released in 1989 by Emerald Software Ltd., the game is loosely based on the Michael Jackson film of the same name. You play as Jackson himself, moving through side-scrolling levels with the general goal of rescuing children from enemies. The film had its own surreal logic; the game mostly borrows the aesthetic — the white suit, the fedora — and leaves the rest on the cutting room floor.

The mechanics are about as deep as a puddle on a hot day. You walk, you attack, you get through the level. The controls on PC feel sluggish in a way that has nothing to do with style and everything to do with budget. Enemies absorb hits with the patience of a government clerk, and the collision detection occasionally decides it simply isn't interested in participating. There's a novelty to hearing a rough approximation of a Jackson track through a PC speaker, the kind of sound that in 1989 still impressed someone, somewhere, briefly.

What Moonwalker represents is a very specific moment in the late eighties when a license was considered a product in itself. Emerald Software was a small outfit, the kind of studio that existed for one or two releases before dissolving back into the ether. They had the name, they had the release window timed to the film, and that was the business plan. The Sega Genesis version of Moonwalker, made by Sega directly, is a completely different game and significantly better by almost every measure. The DOS version is the one that ended up in bargain bins by spring 1990, and honestly, it earned its place there.

The game has aged about as well as you'd expect. It wasn't technically impressive when it came out, the gameplay loop has nothing to offer a modern player beyond morbid curiosity, and the connection to Jackson's actual music and persona is thin enough to see through. What it does have is a kind of artifact quality — a document of how fast and loose the licensed game market moved in that era, when the window between film release and game release was measured in weeks rather than years, and quality control was largely theoretical.

If you fire this up in a browser today, do it as a historian, not a gamer. It tells you more about 1989's software industry than it does about Michael Jackson. That's either its main flaw or its one genuine point of interest, depending on why you clicked on it in the first place.