This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

The Great Console History Reorganization continues, as I go back and fill in games I missed in my original haphazard timeline. Last time, I covered Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon, the second game in the Deep Dungeon series by HummingBirdSoft. If I’d had my timeline in order from the start, next would have been Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero, and now Dr. Chaos, released by Marionette for the Famicom Disk System on June 19, 1987, and later localized for the US market (on the NES) in November 1988 (this is the version I played). It’s an example of early Metroidvania (or perhaps we should all start saying Search Action?) design that I originally skipped because it’s highly derivative of The Goonies II, which I’ve already covered. But, upon reading more about Dr. Chaos, I decided it’s interesting enough to get its own post.

Dr. Chaos is about — you guessed it — Dr. Chaos. Dr. Ginn Chaos, to be specific. He’s a mad scientist brilliant physicist who secluded himself in his mansion to conduct weird experiments into warp zones. You play as his brother, Michael Chaos, who becomes concerned when he hasn’t heard from Ginn in a while and decides to investigate the mansion. It turns out the experiments have gone awry, letting otherworldly monsters into the mansion to wreak havoc. Michael must scrounge for supplies, ammunition, and tools, then enter the various warp zones to collect the pieces of his brother’s device which can defeat the evil creature behind it all.

This premise earns some respect for giving the protagonist an absurd but awesome name. But otherwise, it’s a bit weird. Science experiments in a remote mansion? Wouldn’t those be happening in a laboratory? An article over at Hardcore Gaming 101 (which appears to be down at the time of writing for a server migration) points out that Dr. Chaos bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1985 horror film House (which I have not seen myself). Many details, including several monster designs, are surprisingly close to the film. Maybe the game was intended as an official adaptation, but lost the license and had to change its story? That’s been known to happen with some NES games.

Regardless, Dr. Chaos has a strong emphasis on searching the house for useful items, which is where its mimicry of The Goonies II comes in. Like that game, Dr. Chaos combines side-scrolling platformer action with first-person adventure segments, but it has a much bigger focus on the adventure portion. The corridors of the house are explored in platformer mode, but they’re little more than a series of doors leading to various rooms, where players will root around in adventure mode. Inside, there are cabinets and closets that might contain items, and secret passages to find by hitting the walls (an action straight out of The Goonies II).

But where the rooms in The Goonies II could be confusing to navigate since they could be entered from either the front or back, Dr. Chaos has a much more logical layout. In each room, players are only ever facing one wall at a time, but can turn 90 degrees by moving the cursor to the side of the screen. The south sides of the rooms contain the exits back to the corridor, but the east and west walls can contain doors (or secret passages) leading to adjacent rooms. Sometimes players must travel between rooms this way in order to reach new side-scrolling corridors, or rooms that have no entrance from the corridors at all. But players can suss out where these rooms are likely to be, by noting where there are suspicious door-less sections of corridor. Those are likely hiding a room that can only be entered from another room.

I enjoyed the more intentional exploration I was able to do in Dr. Chaos, compared to The Goonies II. But the biggest difference between the games is the tone. Dr. Chaos goes for a creepy, survival horror atmosphere, despite predating that genre by several years. Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead, which also released in 1987, had a similar horror theme, but it started on Japanese home computers where darker themes were more common. Nintendo tried to promote family friendly games on its console, making Dr. Chaos stand out from its peers.

Michael Chaos enters the house with nothing but a knife, which he uses to fend off the mutated rats and bats infesting the corridors. Once he rummages through a few rooms, however, he’ll find a handful of bullets (for a pistol and, later, a machine gun) and maybe even a grenade or two. These are in limited supply, so he’ll always want to check every room thoroughly for more ammunition, or some medicine to restore his health. Occasionally, however, a monster will jump out of a closet or doorway, chasing Michael back into the corridor where he must frantically fight it off before he can resume his explorations. I was surprised at how close this feels to what the genre would become in titles like Alone In The Dark or Resident Evil. Unfortunately, the feeling doesn’t last; after dealing with a few monster ambushes I was no longer frightened by them, and searching for supplies started to feel like a chore.

Part of this is due to technical limitations. When using a password to resume the game, players start exactly where they were and with all their health and ammo intact, but all of the rooms reset and items within them respawn. So, after surviving a tough sojourn into a warp zone, players can simply go back through all the rooms again to top up their health and ammo. It becomes a rote process, just as boring as refilling Samus’ health in Metroid. If the house were persistent, and players needed to keep moving to new areas if they wanted to find more supplies, it would be a much more effective horror game.

But there’s nothing stopping players from exploring everywhere right away. Once they find the Ultraspace Sensor in the first warp zone, they’re free to wander the entire mansion, although they’ll need to diligently hit different spots on all the walls to find secret passages. There are 11 warp zones in the game, and players can find and enter them all, whenever they like. But they can’t actually complete them right away. Dr. Chaos is a Metroidvania, after all, so there are different upgrades that must be found before players can proceed. These are awkwardly front-loaded, so early in the game I was constantly finding warp zones that I couldn’t complete. Once I finally located the upgrades I needed, I suddenly had free reign to tackle any remaining warp zones in any order I liked.

The warp zones themselves are often frustrating to navigate. They’re where the majority of the platforming action takes place, but they feature a lot of annoying platforming design, like a choice of a high or low path where one turns out to be a dead end. Or sections where missing a jump means backtracking a long way in order to climb back up and try again. Also, most of the zones cannot be completed without the jump boots, but that may not be obvious until halfway through. This makes the early game search for the only possible place to go that much more aggravating. It doesn’t help that a couple of the tougher bosses are faced early as well. And after defeating a boss, players must travel back through the warp zone to return the the house, which can be fatal if the boss battle was a close shave.

All of these issues mean Dr. Chaos is a less enjoyable adventure than The Goonies II. But its survival horror ambitions make it fascinating to play despite its problems. Partly due to the monster ambushes, partly because secret passages are key to navigating the mansion, and partly because the entrances to the warp zones are hidden in unexpected places, I never knew quite what I was going to find in a given room. This makes the house feel vaguely threatening, and exploration tense. I loved how I was able to figure out where I hadn’t been yet simply by analyzing the layout of the house and deducing where other rooms might be, and how I slowly gained an understanding of its structure as I learned to fight back against the otherworldly menace.

I even enjoyed the combat, which seems intentionally clunky. Michael moves slowly and can’t turn around mid-jump, and switching between weapons in the thick of the action is tricky. This makes fights feel clumsy and frantic, fitting for a survival horror game. The grenades also deserve special mention: Michael tosses them out onto the ground where they sit for a second before exploding and damaging everything on the screen. Including Michael himself! This makes them a last resort, used in a panic, until Michael finds the armor upgrade that removes the self-damage and lets him toss grenades left and right as he storms his way to the finale.

If Dr. Chaos had a few more upgrade items that gated progress through the mansion — like, say, the hammer from The Goonies II, without which players cannot hit walls to find secret passages — it would do wonders for the early game pacing. Add in another design pass on the bosses, which vary wildly in difficultly from trivially easy to fickle and obtuse, and some better stage design for the warp zones, and Dr. Chaos would be something really special. As it is, it’s a flawed but interesting game, which manages to tread some new ground despite hewing so closely to The Goonies II. It’s worth a look for any horror fans who are curious about early games in the nascent genre. If you do want to try it, you’ll probably need to use emulation, as I did. As usual for NES games, I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulation core to play.

Next, we’ll jump past Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, which released a mere two days after Dr. Chaos, to a game that released at the end of June, 1987. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!