There are fan projects, and then there are fan projects that make you do a double-take and mutter “wait, that’s running on real hardware?” Mega Splatterhouse — Monster Bath Games’ loving, painstaking port of Namco’s 1988 arcade horror classic Splatterhouse to the Sega Mega Drive and Genesis — is firmly the second kind. And it’s now closing in on the finish line.
As Retro Gameforce reports, the project is almost “feature complete.” The remaining work is finishing stages five and six, after which Monster Bath plans to turn to palette cleanup, music, sound effects, and enemy AI. For the uninitiated (bless you, sweet summer children), the original Splatterhouse is the side-scrolling beat-’em-up where Rick Taylor dons a cursed Terror Mask to rescue his girlfriend from a mansion full of nightmares. It’s gloriously gross, and the idea of it running natively on Sega’s 16-bit hardware — which never officially got the original game — is exactly the kind of thing that keeps retro nerds like me up at night. (The Genesis got Splatterhouse 2 and 3, but never the arcade original. A crime, frankly.)
Here’s the twist that lifts this above your average fan port: Monster Bath doesn’t just want to quietly drop the finished game online. The developer reportedly intends to approach Bandai Namco (or the relevant rights-holders) to try to arrange a legitimate, sanctioned release — partly to stop unofficial cartridge sellers from immediately profiting off somebody else’s labour. Money isn’t the main motivation, apparently; proper stewardship of the project is. Fair play, I say — nothing stings quite like watching bootleggers sell your work back to you.
Now, a spoonful of healthy scepticism: there’s no indication Bandai Namco has agreed to anything, so don’t treat an official release as confirmed. Big publishers and fan projects have a complicated history, to put it mildly. But the ambition is refreshing — a creator who’d rather knock on the front door than sneak in the back window.
If you want to see how far along it already is, Monster Bath has been sharing work-in-progress footage, including a look at the intro and the first two stages:
A Halloween demo has already been out in the wild, so this isn’t vapourware — it’s a real, playable thing that’s nearly done. The only remaining question is whether Rick’s next boss fight is against the horrors of stage six, or a licensing department. Traditionally, the licensing departments have more hit points.
Sources: Retro Gameforce; Time Extension.