Wait, what? Marty is racing to catch a lighting strike’s 1.21 gigawatts of electricity in the DeLorean’s flux capacitor so he can time travel, and while he does that, he has to avoid lightning strikes? Hmmm.
Lightning strikes twice
The sequel, also made by LJN and based upon the second and third movies combined, was almost as bad. Although the actual stories of the films were followed a little more closely, focusing on Biff’s alteration of the timelines, the game itself was totally removed from the movie.
The game was a side-scrolling platformer where you had to pick up random objects and keys littered throughout various levels, returning objects to their correct time periods. You were given very vague clues, and the levels bore little to no resemblance to the time periods themselves. Enemies were also right out of other Nintendo games, even including rip off Koopas, complete with spiked shells. It was a confusing, badly designed mess, and once again did the source material no justice whatsoever.
Oddly enough, the earlier, and technically inferior Commodore 64 Back to the Future title by Electric Dreams was far closer to the movies in terms of content. It was still a pretty poor game, but in it you had to interact with other characters from the movie, such as Marty’s mom and dad, as well as Biff, and your progress was reflected by the photo Marty carries that shows himself and his siblings vanishing (to be fair, the NES version also has this). You even had to find key objects from the movie, such as the skateboard, guitar, and radiation suit, and explore familiar locales.
Later consoles also got a couple of games, notably the Back to the Future III games of the 16-bit console era (which also appeared on home computers like the Spectrum, Commodore 64, PC, Atari ST, and Amiga). These were once again multi-genre games, with different game types for each level, but few managed to get past the awful first level that saw Doc Brown on horseback trying to rescue Clara. It was poorly coded, far too hard, and simply wasn’t worth the time. Once again, a popular film was snubbed with a poor video game adaptation. As is often the case, simply slapping the movie’s name on a box was enough to sell, so little effort was needed and little effort was provided.
All of these games failed miserably to capture the magic of the series, and they didn’t even feature any of the memorable music from the trilogy (at least any that’s recognizable). The music we all know from the movies, such as “Johnny B Goode” or “The Power of Love” were either absent or terribly reproduced, and even the iconic theme by Alan Silvestri was usually missing. It was a stream of poor showings, that much is certain.
