The Beverly Hillbillies

The nineties loved movie licenses like chickens love grain — thoughtlessly and in huge quantities. Beverly Hillbillies from 1993 by Synergistic Software is exactly that kind of game: born in the shadow of the film of the same name, skating on thin ice between nostalgia and comedy of clashing worlds, and predictably enough, it broke through that ice.

The source material is clear — the cult American sitcom from the sixties about the rural Clampett family who unexpectedly strike it rich and move to Beverly Hills. The 1993 film brought that story back to life for a new generation, and the game quickly followed suit, as was customary back then. Genre-wise it's a point-and-click adventure, theoretically the perfect space for comedic dialogue and situational humor that formed the backbone of the source material.

But theory and practice are two different things. While the game does work with characters and settings that viewers knew, the humor survived the transition to game form only partially. The puzzles aren't particularly inventive, and the logic of some solutions is loose in a way that wasn't uncommon for adventures at the time, but here it feels more like unfinished work than deliberate absurdity. The controls follow the conventions of the genre from that era — you click, collect, combine, talk. Nothing that would surprise anyone then, and nothing that does now either.

What keeps the game afloat is its period atmosphere. The graphics match the early nineties — VGA palette, static backgrounds, animated characters with limited expressiveness. The music and sound effects are precisely at the level of an average DOS production; Sound Blaster can't conjure anything memorable in this case. Synergistic Software was a capable studio behind some solid titles, but this license clearly gave them less room to work than they needed.

Today Beverly Hillbillies will be played mainly by those who know the sitcom or film and want to briefly refresh their memory of what movie licenses looked like in an era when nobody really cared if they were any good. As an adventure it doesn't rank among the best DOS had to offer — there were better options then and now. But as a document of the time when Hollywood and the gaming industry began this unproductive dance of licenses, it has its value. At least these days you can finish it without having to buy cassettes of fuel for your retro computer.