Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure

The year is 1989, the cinema, Keanu Reeves says "Be excellent to each other" and I know this is going to be a hit. A year later, the game arrived. And like so many film licenses of that era — the cover grabbed more attention than the content.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure from 1990 by Off The Wall Productions is an adventure set in the world of the film of the same name. Bill and Ted are two incorrigible layabouts tearing through time in a phonetic booth to track down historical figures for their history class. The goal is clear: get the right people back to the right places, or the duo is headed for failure. Saving world history as motivation to succeed at school — there's a certain irony to that.

The PC version from the start looks decent. You navigate screens of various historical periods, collect items and solve simple tasks. The controls and puzzle logic match the standard of cheaper adventures of that era — that is: sometimes intuitive, sometimes pure guesswork. The game doesn't require deep thinking, more patience and a willingness to methodically check every pixel. The sound on PC is exactly what you'd expect from a DOS game from 1990 without special setup — modest to painful.

What works for the game is the atmosphere of the source material. Visually, it captures the essence of the film better than you'd expect from a license of typical quality back then. The problem is that the game design itself doesn't offer enough reason to stick with it. The difficulty is uneven and some transitions between locations are more confusing than mysterious. Anyone who played the Commodore 64 version will have an interesting comparison — the PC version is graphically a step up, sound-wise both systems perform roughly equally poorly.

Today this game mainly appeals to nostalgics who love Bill and Ted movies and want to relive what film licenses looked like at the turn of the eighties and nineties. As an adventure in its own right, it doesn't rank at the top of the heap — it didn't back then either. But as a time capsule where you'll encounter the style of the era and a specific cultural icon of the nineties, it has its place. Fire it up in a browser, give it twenty minutes and see if Napoleon's ice cream and Freud's issues can pull you in any further.