Granted that it has been a long time since I played the game, and that my friend and I had been up all night in some sort of cigar-smoking, video-game-driven delirium at the time, I have strong memories of feeling frustrated by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein on Sega CD....
Being forced to read the “classics” in high school doesn’t always remind me of enjoyable experiences, but reading Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly was a highlight of my required reading regimen. I have since read the novel several times and wonder what I understood of the novel on my first reading at 13 or 14 years old. I am sure, however, that when I played the game in my friend Garrett’s basement, it was not as cool as the book (and I loved video games).
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was co-packaged with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which I don’t remember playing) for the Sega CD gaming system. It is a side-scrolling game that has been labeled as a “horror action adventure” game. You can see a video of someone playing it at Youtube.
The game itself wasn’t that bad. I actually forgot the music being so cool (check out the youtube video). It was more that it wasn’t as unabashedly Romantic as the novel, and Romanticism was appealing to me as a young teen. The game retained the ambiguities of identity and the tensions of the creator/creature relationship from the book, but those are necessities really, and the game-play was mostly just picking up keys and beating people up. It’s hard to portray the awesome movements of Romanticism in a video game, especially in a Sega CD game, and the game-makers might not have been trying anyway.
Actually, the most frustrating part was that I saved our progress right before the ultimate battle, after countless hours in front of the TV. I was confronting Dr. Frankenstein himself, with only the slightest bit of health, thus making it virtually impossible to survive. It was tragic. I really wanted to walk (or hobble) off into the Arctic waste to die some Romantic death in the giant vastness of nature. I might have even looked like a character in some sort of Shelly novel, drained of all energy, out of my mind sprawled on a couch, bemoaning the loss of my final satisfaction.
The game never brought me to die in the Arctic. So I went back to the book, as usual.
[I am currently reading The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, so Romanticism and Science, the foundations of Shelly's novel, are on my front burner, so to speak]
Purchase these titles from Amazon
- Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics)
- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein & Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Sega CD)
I feel honored.