Scooby-Doo: the chase and the case

The Scooby-Doo games split into two ideas that barely speak to each other: being chased, and working out who is behind the mask. The chase came first. Elite's eight-bit Scooby-Doo is a simple action game across the floors of a haunted house, built on timing and route-finding rather than deduction, with ghosts serving purely as obstacles. It is also the single game in this series that starts in the browser here.

The detective branch arrives with Scooby-Doo Mystery, which is structured like an actual episode: you walk a handful of locations, pick up clues, question suspects and finally name the culprit. Accuse the wrong person and the case simply stays unsolved, which is unusually strict for a children's licence. Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers repeats that skeleton on newer hardware — search, interview, accuse — and keeps the same insistence that the player must actually be right.

Costumes, traps and running away

Once the series moved into three dimensions, the emphasis changed again. Scooby-Doo! Mystery Mayhem and its relatives are platform games about errands and scares, where meeting a monster means running first and setting a trap second. Scooby-Doo! Unmasked hangs its levels on a wardrobe: each costume grants a different ability, so progress depends on what you happen to be wearing. Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase adapts the animated film and swaps genre from level to level instead of committing to one.

What that means for this page: every title above has a profile in the catalogue, but playing is limited to the eight-bit Scooby-Doo named at the top. The rest of the series is here to be read about, not launched.