Welcome to deleted saves on this episode, the Bruce Campbell fan club The games of the Evil Dead franchise.

In 1981 the cheaply made and cheaply shot independent horror film would be released that would go on to shape American popular culture for decades to come.

Would it have the residence of A Nightmare in Elm Street, Friday the 13th or Halloween which it was in direct competition with?

Perhaps not, at least not by the amount of pop culture horseshit I see being put on display in this empty culture we survive in.

But if you are more of a geek, in love with aspects of the horror scene, the kind of fan who would love to see Spider Man punching zombies or Batman trying to out think and out tactic the Predator, then this movie series is definitely for you and one that should be on your radar.

And that movie series is The Evil Dead.

I myself would not take an interest in the series until the 1993 release in the United States of the third movie in the series, subtitled Army of Darkness.

When it appeared in my local movie theater, it looked like one of the goofiest and most awesome things I'd seen so far.

And it was a wacky sci-fi fantasy movie revolving around the character of Ash Williams, a chainsaw armed arrogant moron stuck in 1300s England, chopping up the undead and associate evil spirits while trying to get back to the modern day, which back then would have been the early 1990s when the movie was filmed.

This was not high art, certainly no Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood western which won the Oscar that year, but man was it ever fun.

But it would still be a few years before I would collect copies of the older movies in the series, 1981's The Evil Dead and the 1987 sequel Evil Dead 2 Dead by Dawn.

And wow, these movies could not be further apart in their tone and presentation.

The first movie is straight up horror with lots of demon possessions, creepy backwoods atmosphere, buckets of red colored Caro syrup, and five college kids being whittled down to a sole survivor.

By the end of a very long night of slaughter, that sole survivor, who may or may not have died, as well as dawn breaks across the woods.

The second movie is a soft reboot of the 1st, at least for the 1st 20 minutes, and after that it becomes an action horror movie where the main hero Ash gets mutilated more and more by the evil within the woods until he snaps and starts fighting back with whatever improvised weapon or Saturday afternoon pro wrestling move he can think of.

Then four new victims arrive at the cabin, all of them getting hacked up until the final confrontation where Ash armed himself quite literally with a chainsaw to replace a missing hand and a sawed off shotgun.

Capable of improbable amounts of shots and the ability to blow garage door sized holes in anything.

Total fantasy, but it helped stand out from the crowd of gory slashers and monster movies the 1980s were dripping with.

All of this would be brought to life by three men, long time childhood friends who got into film in various stages.

Producer Rob Tappert, a multi award-winning director by the name of Sam Raimi and the character of Ash being brought to life by one of the best B movie actors of our time, Bruce Campbell.

This underground film sensation would find itself touching decades of pop culture around it.

The first film got its attention of famed horror author Stephen King.

Raimi sparked a friendly rivalry with Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven over the first film.

Bruce Campbell will get to snark on Tobey Maguire multiple times in the early 2000s blockbuster Spider Man films, and it's likely your favorite video game character has even quoted one of the lines spoken by Campbell as Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy, among other things.

The original franchise now has a television spin off, 2 direct sequels and a third being filmed at time of this recording, various comic book adaptations, toys, posters, graphic T-shirts and all sorts of the effluvia of pop culture and of course video games, which is why we're here today.

Surprisingly, the Evil Dead franchise has a total of 11 video game titles tied to it going back to 1984 with the release on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Hardly have I played them all.

By and large, they are known to be pretty cheaply made, mostly as fan service titles, and have trouble even breaking into the AA spectrum of game development.

But these games can still be a lot of fun in their ridiculousness, which often is more in keeping with the latter entries in this film series where the movies truly shine.

But let's get into the games I have played in this series history.

In the year 2000, we would see the release of the Evil Dead Hail to the King on the PlayStation One.

This title was released so late in the life cycle of the PS1 that the system was practically a zombie itself.

But the studio responsible for the development of the game, Heavy Iron Studios, made sure Hail to the King played like a game that would have debuted right in 1995.

By which I mean it is clunkier than shit.

Hail to the King is a Resident Evil clone in everything but name.

And this after Resident Evil 3 had come out taking full advantage of five years of development, tweaks and pushing of the hardware.

The story of this game goes like this.

Eight years after the end of the movie Army of Darkness, Ash has rebuilt his life, gotten his job back at S Mart, and has a new girlfriend named Jenny.

Ash is starting to have recurring nightmares about the Deadites returning the possessed undead of the movie franchise, so Jenny takes Ash back to the cabin where it all began upon arrival, and the cabin being suspiciously in the same condition as it was when Ash got sucked into a time portal outside the cabin.

By the end of Dead by Dawn, Ash's possessed severed hand turns on the tape recorder from the movies and the possessions start again when Ash's evil twin appears and kidnaps Jenny.

By the way dear listeners, to really give a lot of the context of what I'm saying, I would have to try and recap 3 full length feature films.

The problem with this game and the games on this list is that they assume you have already seen the Evil Dead film franchise and are likely already a fan.

If you were coming into this cold and without any context to the movies, then yeah, you are going to have a bad time, but I'll come back to that anyway.

Ash spends much of the game at this point running through the woods are outside Dearborn MI where all this takes place, trying to recover missing pages of the Curse of Necronomicon, the book that started this mess, and the Candarian dagger that was used to sacrifice lives for the making of his bloody tome.

All the while chainsawing and shotgunning undead campers possess wilderness scouts and animals mutated by evil Ash is looking for a priest named Father Allard who can help him make sense of this new outbreak of insanity and recover his girlfriend.

But after spending much of the game being lost on identical looking pre rendered backgrounds of generic Woodlands to find these pages, Allard is revealed to be Evil Ash in disguise, who then takes Jenny with him and leaps through yet another time portal.

Ash on hot pursuit and the whole crew of them lands in 9th century Arabia where he must spend some time tracking Evil Ash down before he sacrifices Jenny to the evil gods.

Ash and his monstrous twin fight.

Evil Ash is driven back through a portal and our hero and his damsel in distress return to modern day Dearborn, only to realize the world they returned to was taken over by the very dark gods Ash was trying to stop.

And Ash screams as the game ends.

And that was just the plot.

The game is, in a word, bad.

It still used tank controls in the year 2000.

I frequently had melee attacks and gunshots veer wildly off target while in combat or just phase through enemies.

The hit boxes were that far off.

The pre rendered backgrounds were so identical.

Too much of the game became an accidental maze and there was nothing about this game that wasn't at least five years out of date.

From menu interfaces to voice work.

They had Bruce Campbell himself voice Ash in this new script and Christ Sag must have fucked Bruce out of his pay because the man himself sounds bored at best.

At worst, he's trying to speed his way through this thing just to get out of it.

You want to know what the Metacritic on this game is?

It's 51 on the PlayStation, it's 49 on Dreamcast and 40 on PC.

I'm a fan of these movies in this franchise.

And yeah, I agree this is a bad game.

It received mixed reviews as they say in its time most outlets received reviewed it at best around 4.5 out of 10.

Heavy Iron Studios made a terrible licensed game of what should have been a slam dunk property right around the turn of the 21st century when it was hottest and THQ published the damn thing and they botched it.

I only forced myself through this game because I am a fan of the movies and I wanted to see where it went.

And where it went was a badly written soft reboot of both Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness simultaneously.

The game is pretty much the plot of both movies stitched together very poorly.

Unfortunately, this is already a bad start to bringing this movie franchise into the console generation, especially when much better game franchise is inspired in part by these movies.

We're available to the public because I'm a glutton for punishment.

I picked up 2003's PlayStation 2 release of Evil Dead.

A fistful of Boomstick.

You thought the last one was weird?

Well, here we go again.

Taking place three years after the end of Hail to the King, explaining nothing about how Dearborn recovered from being overrun by literal dark gods.

I guess they just decided Dearborn wasn't worth it.

And after Jenny died off screen in a bus crash, Boomstick finds our hero Ash Williams drunk at a bar on the night a local journalist looking to make a name for herself is interviewing A parapsychologist live on local TV about the murders at a cabin in the woods of which Ash is the perennial sole survivor.

Only to play a tape of the demonic chant from the cabin that set off the whole Necronomicon possession event in the middle of the interview.

With the summoning ritual going on live on local television, portals begin to open all over town with demons flooding in, killing and possessing the living.

Ash, now the foremost expert on killing ancient Sumerian demons, has no choice but to grab his chainsaw shotgun from his 1978 LAG wagon and head out into the nightmare streets of Michigan to stop the end of the world yet again.

Keep in mind this is a story Ash is telling to an unnamed Asian man, and the whole game is told via flashback.

After hacking his way through town, Ash finds the reporter and the parapsychologist, her name Tricia and his Eldridge, and the three agree they must once again find the pages of the Necronomicon.

And they have Ash do all The Dirty work.

And with enough pages gathered, Eldridge begins teaching Ash magic spells.

The point of this misadventure is to get into the Dearborn Museum, where a Kandarian demon summoning stone that could end all of this can be found, and the three make their way there.

Ash gets sidetracked and arrives late and cannot find Tricia or Eldridge until he is attacked by monsters and must fight the museum's founder, who was locked in a secret museum chamber and was turned into a demon centuries ago by the Stone.

And in A twist anyone could see coming, Eldridge, it turns out, wants the Stone for himself to take over the world.

Eldridge let's Tricia escape before fleeing into a time portal, and Ash tries to put the moves on this comely reporter before diving in after him.

Ash has dumped out in 1695 Dearborn, supposedly colonial times, which is hilarious as there weren't any colonial English settlers in Michigan in 1695, but who cares, this is an Evil Dead game.

Gets mistaken for the local blacksmith, kills even more deadites, chases Eldridge, somehow upgrades his saw and shotgun with inferior materials, and leaps through another portal after him.

This new portal dumps everyone out in 1863.

Dearborn during the Civil War really has to convince the Union and Confederate troops to call a ceasefire to stop the Deadites.

Folks, just for my own curiosity, I did type into Google the phrase Did the Confederacy ever invade Dearborn, MI?

Like a middle schooler trying to write a history paper the night before it was due.

I already knew the answer of course, but rest assured, the people of Dearborn never faced Confederate invasion during the Civil War.

But again, bullshit video game even the developers knew was bullshit.

Anyway.

In this time, Ash is able to kill Eldridge with help of a modified Gatling gun and the combined forces of Union and Confederate armies and returns home upon arrival in his own time.

Dearborn is once again under the sway of the Dark Gods and Ash as Ash left the Candarian stunning stone back in the Union Fort in 1863.

The Deadites are attacking at the request of their Queen, who turns out to be Tricia as she decided to take the stone now that Eldridge is gone and rule the world herself.

Holy crap.

Ash kills Tricia, tries to use the stone instead of everything right, and as it wouldn't be an Evil Dead related media product without Ash fucking it up, he bungles it and warps himself to feudal Japan during the Mongol invasion.

It would have been hilarious if developer Sucker Punch would have put an Evil Dead reference in Ghost of Tsushima, but alas, such was not to be.

The Asian man he was talking to at the start of the game was Emperor Kamayama, the most real historic figure in this whole game who has not understood a word Ash has said the whole time.

The Emperor instead takes the Kandarian summoning stone to destroy the Mongols and kill Ash simultaneously, but in doing so unleashes the forces of evil upon Japan and suddenly the court explodes and possessed an undead samurai.

Ash grabs a Cortana, screams come get some in perfect Japanese, and the game ends with Ash once again lost in time and low on gas.

Well this game at least plays better than Hail to the King, developed by VIS Entertainment and they did the least utilize the PlayStation Two's hardware and game pad much better than the previous title.

And this game did at least play well for it's time.

Better in some cases depending on the game in question.

It ditched the tank controls at least.

Yes, I played through this game the same reason I played through the last one, because I'm a ridiculous fan.

The game has a 55A Metacritic, strangely A58 on the original Xbox release and as you can guess it ate a lot of shit in the press.

Electronic Gaming Monthly at the time gave this game a, and I don't know how this was even possible.

A 2.67 out of 10, the lowest of all the game outlets in 2003 to review it, most of whom were around 5.5 out of 10.

The only outlet that scored the game lower was Maxim magazine.

Maxim, a magazine whose whole reason to exist was to compare the breast sizes of female celebrities, give out bad weight lifting tips, and try and convince a bunch of college frat boys that bands like the Strokes and Arctic Monkeys were actually good.

Maxim was Playboy for abject in the cell cowards and Bible college evangelicals who would burst into flames of sexual frustration for even seeing photos of naked women.

They gave the game A2 out of 10.

They must have come from the Entertainment Weekly school of game reviewing.

Yes, the plot of this game is fucking insane and not good, but you aren't there for a quality plot.

You are there to watch Bruce Campbell ham it up on screen, or at least a good digital avatar of them anyway and utter ludicrous but oddly catchy insults and quips and play through a gleeful zombie survival simulator.

The counter argument to much more serious and dour survival horror entries like Resident Evil, Silent Hill or Fatal Frame.

You are here for a good time.

An 8 hour long popcorn game and at least the $20 price tag of its launch was correct.

One of the few times the game industry has correctly valued the software it had produced, especially on an original licensed game.

The last game I would try my hand at was 2005's Evil Dead Regeneration.

I say try because this was a Hollywood video rental for the PlayStation 2 and I didn't finish this one.

I couldn't do it.

The basic plot was that this game takes place in an alternate timeline where Army of Darkness never happened.

Instead, Ash was arrested by the police the morning after the end of Dead by Dawn for the murders of his girlfriend, sister, college buddies, the Nobby family, and two random hillbillies.

The cast of victims of the 1st 2 movies.

Too dangerous to be put in prison.

Ash is committed to a mental asylum for the criminally insane.

One night, Ash is visited by an undead dwarf created in his image.

A creation of the asylum Keepers and the Deadites are unleashed upon Dearborn once again by staff intent on using the power of Necronomicon to rule the world.

The point of this game?

Was to use the deadite dwarf to solve puzzles or otherwise punt like a football to get out of various situations.

This developers cranky pants games with THQ publishing once again.

This they believed was comedy.

This among it really being a shit title was what caused me to pull the disc out of my PS2 and return it a day later for something else, I don't remember what.

I'm not doing the Plot Summary because I think that this is about all I need to know about the rest of regeneration, and likely all we need to know is a group, dear listeners.

Yet the game sits at 68 out of 100 on Metacritic.

The best of the bunch, I guess.

And that would be the last game based on the Evil Dead franchise for a number of years.

There was a mobile game in 2011 which I did not play, and then nothing until 20/22 when a game similar in scope to the Fright of the 13th 5 versus 1 style of game came out.

Able to leverage the fame of the success of Ash versus the Evil Dead streaming series.

The 2013 semi reboot of the original Evil Dead movie.

I say semi reboot as it is believed that due to a last minute cameo by Bruce himself that the events of that movie take place decades after Ash and his friends died in the cabin with with similar results and with the knowledge that the 2023 film Evil Dead Rise was on the way to theaters and to a rather surprising amount of financial success.

As I said earlier, these games assume a lot.

I think the biggest problem with video games that they had, outside of these technical limitations, different, little known developers and varying levels of production quality is that they assume the player is already a fan of the movies and that you already know the plot of these and the story beats.

Yes, they have tried to recap the movie plots, but they are often short, almost afterthoughts and with a lot of assumptions that the people watching the recaps have still already seen the story up until now and just need a refresher.

You really can't develop a successful game series and assume the player is already a member of the Bruce Campbell fan club.

Otherwise it just looks like a cynical cash grab.

And I guess in the end those games were.

I'm sure they started out games for fans, by fans, the road to hell is paved with good attentions after all.

But in the end they became something else.

And each of them features a time travel plot for no real reason beyond the movies did it with their own bombast when it all became too much.

All of these games are retellings of the 2nd and 3rd movies in some fashion or another.

The ones the fans remembered best.

They aren't horror games, they are comedy horror leading into comedy action games.

This stopped being the Thing and became Buckaroo Bonsai halfway through development just over and over again.

Even the media surrounding the games didn't do that.

But what they don't feel like is The Evil Dead just something mocking that franchise growing its skin.

I don't know if the developers weren't allowed to go outside that box.

I mean, it's not like Tappert or Raymie were developing these games in any way.

And Campbell was doing other things too, just taking pay for voicing a character he helped create.

Or is it a matter of simply not knowing what to do with the property and just rehashing all the ground?

I don't really know.

And since I don't have the patience, connections, or Internet clout to go digging around and emailing developers to get such answers, then perhaps I never will know.

And this isn't a movie podcast either.

Hell, there are more than enough of those out there, as almost as many as video game podcast at this point.

I'll let them do the film analysis and figure out what's what.

But these games are bad.

There's no way around that.

I enjoyed my time with them, but as I said, it is because I'm already a fan.

Or was a fan.

An aging fan who has moved on to other things as time has moved on.

Would I play these games now?

Maybe, maybe not.

I certainly didn't play the 2022 game, but mostly because I don't like that style of game that they were built upon.

Not because the game itself was good or bad or something in between.

But the strength of the franchise alone certainly wasn't enough to get me to put aside my distrust of that 5V1 style of game to try and find out.

For as much influence and references the first trilogy of films has had in the game industry, especially if you were to know where to look when studios actually had the license and property in hand, they sure misfired on what to do with it.

With it now being 44 years since the debut of the Evil Dead, with reboots, revivals, and the original cast and crew rapidly aging into retirement obscurity, it is unlikely that we will get a truly good game based on the movie franchise, and likely soon without any of the principal cast being able to return to do their character voices.

Not every movie needs a tie in game anymore and the public has lost its taste for licensed games it seems.

But I still feel we could do better.

In a world where Spider Man and Batman got blockbuster games with no movie tie in or television show to promote in the right hands, we could still do right by Ash and crew and the Deadites one more time, especially with such a cult classic series.

And let's be honest, video games love being bringing cult classics to life and placing it in the hands of players to experience in an all new way.

Cult classic films and video games are like peanut butter and chocolate in that way.

2 great tastes that taste great together.

Or maybe like chainsaws and shotguns for horror nerds.

We got a lot of those in video games too.

It's part of our language, our codex.

Like we're doomed to repeat ourselves.

Thank you for listening.

Groovy deleted saves.

We'd like to thank Brad Keith Gasper, Orton Wells Maslama, and Martin Kibble for being patrons of the show.

If you would like to become a patron of the show, please go to patreon.com and check out Deleted Saves Podcast.

All donations go directly towards maintaining the show itself.

Thank you.