Here’s Why A Nightmare On Elm Street Game Hasn’t Happened In Decades

With Friday the 13th, Halloween, and other horror franchises getting video game adaptations in recent years, you might wonder when it'll be Freddy Krueger's turn, but according to Illfonic, the team behind those games, the task is harder than you might think. To do it right, one aspect of the films creates a big roadblock.

"There are plenty of IPs that people are like, 'Why aren't you doing this?' and 'Why aren't you doing that?' As much as I love Elm Street, [those movies are] about these big over-the-top kills," Illfonic's chief creative officer Jared Gerritzen told me in a Zoom call. "Same with Terrifier, where it's like these big, over-the-top kills that you would expect that you would have to do [in order] to do it right. That's the most costly thing, in some cases. You'd have to do hundreds of those to build that basis. You'd have to do all these other layers, and then it just becomes like, 'Well, shit.' Like, there are all these quagmires that we can't go into, and so for us, we're very diligent about the IPs that we choose."

With Freddy's dream world seeming like a great fit for a game, I'd long envisioned Elm Street as an obvious fit for an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game akin to Illfonic's other titles, but listening to Gerritzen speak on the pitfalls, it occurred to me that he's right.

It's hard to imagine a game creating enough elaborate set-piece kills to keep them feeling fresh for players who may play for dozens or hundreds of hours, but neither does it make sense to rinse and repeat the same standout moments like Tina's nightmare that saw her crawling on the ceiling, or the way Glen's bed swallows him whole and erupts with a geyser of blood. 

Freddy doesn't usually catch up to someone and finish them off with his iconic glove in a way that maps well onto multiplayer. He makes a meal out of them, and that's hard to translate into a game built on replayability.

Gerritzen explained that his team has worked on so many games of this sort that, by now, it gives them something like a running start.

"We've been through this so much that when we start off a game, we already know what the pitfalls are. [...] And so we start off with a pretty good skeleton, and then we add those layers of the project that we love. We turn down a lot of stuff because it's just like, 'Hey, to do this, it doesn't make sense in a video game form.'"

In addition to those gameplay pitfalls, there seems to be a rights issue tying up the Elm Street franchise broadly, too. Though Gerritzen didn't comment on that aspect, it's recently been reported that competing Elm Street movies may soon be in the works--one for US audiences and one for international audiences--because the ownership of the intellectual property is currently split. That sort of rights quagmire probably scares off some creators, following what happened to Friday the 13th.

Does this mean we'll never get a Freddy game? I don't think that's what Gerritzen meant, though it may mean a team other than Illfonic is the one to make it, or it could be that Illfonic finds a way to make it work in the future. 

For now, the team is focused on supporting Halloween, which launched on September 8 and has surpassed a million copies sold, alongside its cabinet of other asymmetrical multiplayer games, Predator: Hunting Grounds, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

For more on the team behind Halloween, here's what Illfonic said about why comparisons to Dead by Daylight are inherently flawed.

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