Halloween Without The Killer Klowns Game Just Won’t Be The Same

Spooky season hasn’t always been my favorite time of year. I’m still scarred by that fateful Halloween night in 1985 when little towheaded me went toddling down my quaint suburban street with a plastic Cookie Monster mask digging slightly into my eyeballs, and a scarecrow zipping down a clothesline had me crying and running back home with just one pack of Smarties and a fun-size Snickers to show for it. I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered from that.

So when I tell you that Killer Klowns From Outer Space is one of my favorite movies, I don’t want to leave any doubt about just how far out of my comfort zone I had to go to even fall into its mesmerizing circus tent-shaped spaceship of off-the-wall hilarity.

You can’t walk into a Spirit Halloween without being assaulted by clown masks, popcorn gun props, and foam rubber cream pies…and you can’t walk into a struggling business district without running into a Spirit Halloween.

At a time in life when I couldn’t even watch Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark with the lights out, a fated late-night flip to the classic movies channel showed me one of the most bizarre spectacles I’d ever seen: clowns with freakishly large heads liquefying a security guard by throwing pies at him, firing killer popcorn (which are actually baby klowns) at our heroes, and cocooning their victims in cotton candy, only to melt the flesh from their bones and drink up the slurry with crazy straws. As a little kid, I was still spooked, but more importantly, I was intrigued.

Riding The Sweet Wave Of Creepy Nostalgia

Shorty, Rudy, Jumbo, and the rest of the interstellar circus freaks are currently enjoying a wave of nostalgia the likes of which I’ve never seen. You can’t walk into a Spirit Halloween without being assaulted by clown masks, popcorn gun props, and foam rubber cream pies—my partner and I own the hand puppets from Spikey’s big scene—and you can’t walk into a struggling business district without running into a Spirit Halloween. Going there at least once a week has become a tradition in my household, if for no other reason than to see if the new animatronics are up, and I was so delighted last year when I found my favorite childhood villains staring back at me from so many different angles and pieces of merch.

But one thing I’ve noticed from my frequent trips to the spooky store is that Halloween trends change. Aside from the evergreen slasher movie monsters, the Sanderson Sisters, Beetlejuice, and Jack Skellington, people get bored pretty fast and move on. And while it may be a cult classic, I’m a little concerned over the fact that we still won’t have the Killer Klowns From Outer Space video game adaptation this year.

This May marked 35 years since the original film’s theatrical release, which is a decent milestone, so it would have been great if the developers could have had asymmetrical survival horror game out this year (and I’m still only mildly peeved that our own Sam Woods got to play it and I didn’t).

But Nothing Lasts Forever

I suppose there are still other chances to keep the Klowns fresh in people’s minds, but I’m not holding my breath for more big or small-screen adaptations. The planned 2012 3D movie sequel never happened, but to be fair, a lot of people were expecting the world to end that year, so I guess I can forgive that unfulfilled promise. Syfy has also apparently shown interest in some made-for-TV Killer Klowns content as well, but those rumors have been going around since 2018 without a single cotton candy-wrapped skeleton to show for it.

Don’t get me wrong; I like my games to spend enough time in the oven, and I’m glad that Teravision Games, and IllFonic are taking their time to try and get this one just right. I don’t just want to destroy humanity as/save humanity from the Killer Klowns in a stable, playable state, but one that’s been well-tested and tweaked to perfection.

As it stands, the game’s Steam page has an incredibly vague 2024 release date (although the game’s official website is still listing it as releasing in “early 2023”, so someone might want to check one that), but the fact that it’s still planned for modern consoles in addition to PC leaves me hopeful that it’s just being optimized to run of every platform, hopefully with crossplay. I just hope the wave of nostalgia doesn’t crash back onto the shores of reality before this five-on-seven asymmertrical survival game really gets to shine. Because just like Klownzilla’s big red nose, that bubble’s got to burst eventually.