Hook up the proton packs — Halloween is coming, and one Ghostbusters superfan has decided the 1989 Amiga game didn’t do the film justice.
David Annel, a member of the German Ghostbusters fan group Die Geisterjäger, has released a free “Screen Accurate Mod” for Ghostbusters II on the Commodore Amiga — the Foursfield-developed, Activision-published tie-in from 1989 — reworking its graphics and sounds across all three stages to bring it closer to the film. It’s the kind of detail-obsessed fan craft I live for. A blue police car sits where the Ecto-1A used to park above ground. Even the slime is pink now — flowing pink, like the movie’s psychomagnotheric river, replacing the game’s questionable green. At the bottom of the shaft, the Van Horne station gets its stone sign, railings, cobwebs, and rubble.
The other two stages get the treatment too. The Statue of Liberty shoot-’em-up gets pink slime, new firing audio, and a new slime-pickup sound. The isometric museum finale keeps its Vigo boss battle, but the team rappels in wearing the film’s tan uniforms, Vigo’s lightning crackles with a new effect, and — my favourite touch — a downed Ghostbuster now reads “K.O.” instead of “DEAD”. Somehow reassuring, that.
Annel is blunt about the mod’s limits: it doesn’t add new levels, so the game’s infamous brevity remains. Reviewers in 1989 slammed it for being ridiculously short, and it’s famously hard — Ghostbusters News admits it’s beaten in roughly ten minutes by those who can survive it. That’s exactly why the mod’s other headline feature exists: a hidden “Secret Settings” trainer menu with a ghost-shaped cursor and scrolling ticker that lets players pick their starting level and switch on cheats — unlimited lives, courage, and weapon resources in Van Horne; unlimited slime for Lady Liberty; unlimited energy in the museum. Rounding things out: a new intro screen, revised credits, and a fix for a crash that could occur after Game Over.
The technical details are proper retro. The download contains two BPS patches — not the game itself; you’ll supply your own disk images of the two-disk QTX version, with checksums and installation instructions in the README. Annel tested the mod on his real Amiga 500 (Kickstart 1.3), a Gotek drive, and in WinUAE and FS-UAE. One honest caveat: on a 512 KB machine the game runs, but the new sounds and trainer features need 1 MB of RAM (512 KB Chip + 512 KB additional). No ROM hunting needed beyond the copy you already own — patch-only, patch-clean.
It’s a mod by one fan, for fans, and it costs nothing. There’s something quietly perfect about one person looking at a 37-year-old licensed game and saying “the slime should be pink” — and then making it pink. If you’ve got an Amiga gathering dust, Halloween week is looking like the excuse you needed.
Check out the trailer below:
Sources: Time Extension · Ghostbusters News · GenerationAmiga · DaveAn’s itch.io