Abadox gave gamers a gruesome 8-bit experience
Abadox is a game that never really developed a cult following — despite the fact it’s easily one of the grossest and most disturbing titles to ever make its way to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES.)
The game has an interesting back story. Amazingly, it’s not even the first NES game that plays the whole Fantastic Voyage routine for horrific effect. A few years earlier, publishing titan Konami beat Abadox to the punch with arcade favorite Life Force (which, despite the name, has nothing to do with that one movie directed by Tobe Hooper.) Both games have more or less the exact same premise — you control a space ship flying through the “body” of a planet-sized demon — but Abadox took the concept to truly stomach-churning heights. Or lows, depending on your perspective.
Comparatively, Life Force took a low-key approach to the gimmick. Sure, that game did have you flying through levels that looked like they were made out of ground beef and occasionally made you shoot it out with a sentient skull every now and then, but Abadox went full-on body horror with the concept. As in, you’re LITERALLY flying through intestines and having to dodge teeth, tongues and eyeballs — it’s pretty much the closest we ever got to David Cronenberg making a Nintendo title.
Before Abadox even BEGINS you know you’re in store for something truly horrific. The title screen alone displays the name of the game dripping with blood and what appears to be brain matter, at a time when it was VERY uncommon to see exposed viscera or spilled plasma in ANY NES game. You kind of wonder how this game managed to slip past the notoriously strict Nintendo censors. They wouldn’t let the Castlevania games have crosses, for crying out loud, when this game makes you do battle with a rotting dog corpse in the very FIRST level. I’m just guessing here, but I think the fact that the publisher of the game was Milton Bradley — yes, the same people who made Monopoly! — probably had something to do with the lax scrutiny of the game’s contents.
There’s not a lot of implied gore in this game. Indeed, it’s all GLARINGLY apparent when you play it. The “ground” in the game is a grotesque jumble of entwined guts and what appears to be fatty tissue. Even the enemy spaceships hurtling at you nonstop have trails of organs dripping behind them. It’s like a Tales From The Crypt version of Galaga, mixed with an explosion at a hot dog factory with no survivors. How this thing managed to avoid national boycotts from concerned parents groups back in the day is simply inexplicable. Keep in mind, it’s not like this was a super low-key game that nobody knew about; indeed, it had NATIONAL television commercials airing on children’s programming. It LITERALLY began with a disembodied announcer screaming “it’s the grossest thing in the universe!” and ends with an exuberant young child being SPRAYED WITH PUREED VISCERA. Even the print ads for the game looked more like the cover art for some Satanic death metal band’s unholy music. Hard to imagine that the same people who protested Mighty Mouse for alleged “drug references” NEVER went on a coast to coast crusade against THIS thing.
Sure, there were certainly some gross and violent games on the NES. Unsurprisingly, the most egregious ones were all unlicensed and unauthorized by Nintendo; but even WITH all of its guts, gore and gunge, Abadox STILL managed to snag an official “Nintendo Seal of Quality.” Now, I’m not saying corporate favoritism was in effect here, but I have a hard time imagining this thing getting the thumbs up from Nintendo had it NOT been published by the same people who held the copyrights for Battleship and Candy Land.
As for the game itself, Abadox is a fairly formulaic game, even if it does contain more splattered body parts than Peter Jackson’s pre-LOTR filmography. It’s a generic shoot-em-up in terms of gameplay, with an absolutely absurd difficulty curve. It’s not uncommon to see this game on a list of the most bone-crunchingly difficult NES games ever and yeah, it IS certainly one of the most grueling and challenging pieces of software ever released for the system.
These games were kinda like playable Luis Bunuel movies, in the sense that a whole bunch of dreamlike nonsense bombarded you nonstop and you never question the sanity of any of it. It’s a phantasmagorical experience, through and through, kind of like a version of Un Chien Andalou crossed with a mix-tape of autopsy videos. The same way you never really ask yourself WHY people are getting their eyeballs sliced open in that aforementioned movie, you never really ask yourself WHY you’re having to fight a skeleton zombie shark or a 20-foot robo-Golem inside a Jupiter-sized monster’s lower intestine in this particular game.
I feel like I’d be lying to you if I said Abadox was a “good” game, at least in the traditional sense. It’s a downright frustrating title at times and there’s not much in the way of replay value. And the graphics and audio, while decent, are hardly the best the NES had to offer. What Abadox DOES offer, however, is an unexpectedly horrifying experience with some the most insane visuals you’ll find in ANY NES game.
When Milton Bradley subtitled this one “The Deadly Inner War,” they weren’t kidding. Good luck playing through this one on a full stomach … or even an empty one, for that matter.
