The Evil Dead

The Evil Dead reached the Commodore 64 in 1984 through Palace Software, and it stands as one of the earliest game licences taken from a horror film. That alone is worth noting, since film adaptations were still establishing themselves as a category and horror was a rare subject in 8-bit output.

The source is the low-budget 1981 film in which a group shut themselves inside a cabin in the woods and face something besieging them from outside. The game extracts what 8-bit hardware could actually deliver from that premise: an enclosed space you are trying to hold, attackers arriving from several directions, and constant pressure to respond wherever the next weak point opens.

The Commodore 64 had one genuinely good tool for this kind of atmosphere in the SID sound chip. Games of 1984 routinely built tension through audio, because the machine's resolution could not carry much on its own. Palace Software would later become better known for Barbarian and Cauldron, so this is a look at the label's earlier work.

The record lists a single player and places the title in the Evil Dead series. The text-based viewpoint tag in the data does not match how the game actually presents itself, so treat that field with caution.

OldGame.cz runs it directly in the browser, which for a 1984 cassette release is by some distance the easiest way to reach it. Expect something short, harsh and technically plain. Its value today lies mostly in showing how horror material was handled at a point when the medium had almost no means to represent it.