Licence To Thrill: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Kieren Hawken is your bodacious guide to the numerous adaptations created for this most excellent time-travelling movie
There was a time back in the late Eighties and early Nineties when almost everyone was reciting lines from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. In classrooms and playgrounds all around the world you could hear cries of, “Totally bodacious!”, “No way – yes way!” and, “Party on dude!” Even today, the adventures of Bill and Ted continue to have an impact on pop culture. Who hasn’t seen a meme with Keanu Reeves’ fresh-looking face on it?
Written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon and directed by Stephen Herek, the film starred Alex Winter as Bill Preston, Keanu Reeves as Ted Logan and George Carlin as Rufus. Not only was the film commercially successful, it is now considered a cult classic and spawned a sequel two years later in the form of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. The success of the film obviously made it ideal videogame fodder, especially when you consider the movie’s younger target audience. Unusually for the time, it wasn’t just one company which picked up the licence for Bill & Ted, Orion Pictures chose to sign agreements with several different publishers: Capstone Software picked up the rights for the home computer versions, LJN grabbed the Nintendo rights and, in a more surprising move, a usually tightfisted Atari paid out for the opportunity to produce an excellent adventure for its handheld Lynx console.
The film’s plot tells us that in the year 2688 the human race lives in a utopian society due to the inspiration, music and wisdom of the so-called ‘Two Great Ones’: Bill Preston Esquire and Ted S Logan. Time traveller
Rufus has been tasked by the leaders of this world to travel back to San Dimas, California, in 1988, using a special ship disguised as a telephone booth, to ensure that Bill and Ted get good grades in their final-year history exam. The problem is that
Bill and Ted are nothing more than dimwitted slackers who are more interested in heavy metal music than history. If they fail their exams then Ted’s father, local Police Captain John
Logan, plans to ship Ted to a military academy in Alaska, thus ending the emergence of Bill and Ted’s fledgling band the Wyld Stallyns. As any fan of time travel will probably know, changing major events such as this would have a catastrophic effect on the future. The best buddies are really struggling with their history assignment, which asks them to envisage how three historical figures would see San Dimas in the present. For some reason, Bill and Ted try to enlist the help of random strangers at the local Circle K convenience store, but Rufus arrives just in time to stop the poor plan. At first the tubular twosome don’t trust Rufus and send him away, but our time-travelling hero has a trick up his sleeve as he comes back with two assistants – future versions of Bill and Ted themselves! They prove to their younger selves that they are really them and that they should trust Rufus implicitly. From here the film really starts as they all take a trip through the past that has the trio interacting with a number of very important historical figures.
The excellent adventure that Bill and Ted embark upon sees them kidnap many of these characters that they encounter to aid them with their school project. Before long, the gnarly troupe includes such figures as Napoleon, Billy the Kid, Henry VIII, Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud and Genghis Khan. Each of these characters leave an important impression on the lives of our heroes, as do the many locations that they visit along the way. In many ways, the array of situations that feature in the game make it perfect for a videogame adaptation. At the time, the common template for a movie game was to take key scenes from the film and build levels around them. This was something that had previously been perfected by Ocean Software. So it’s especially interesting that each of the three separate parties involved in the videogame adaptations of Bill & Ted took disparate different approaches to their games. Capstone,
ted, you and i have witnessed many things, but nothing as bodacious as what just happened Bill S Preston Esq
which published the Amiga, PC and Commodore 64 versions of the game, chose to go for a side-scrolling arcade adventure where you have to find the right items to bribe each historical figure to return with you. In many ways it’s quite reminiscent of the Monkey Island games, but more arcade-like in its execution with you using a joystick to guide both Bill and Ted around at once. Surprisingly, LJN’S NES and Game Boy offerings are both very different. The NES game is an isometric arcade-style adventure while the Game Boy offering is a decent platformer that reminds us of Chuckie Egg. Last but not least, Atari’s Lynx game is a top-down, Rpg-style adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of The Legend Of Zelda in many ways.
Of all the games released, it’s the NES game that is perhaps the most notorious, receiving a number of disappointing reviews on release.
The NES game was the subject of an episode of Angry Video Game Nerd where the titular character bemoaned about the illogical nature of LJN’S offering, a company widely renowned for the poor quality of its games, and the inability to interact between the two main characters. He was also very critical of the way it deviated so massively from the actual film, but did praise the impressive isometric visuals. LJN’S Game Boy version is very similar to the NES game in that it’s nothing like the movie, which is probably why some mags gave it low scores at the time. Game Zone magazine was very critical of it on release calling it “the worst Game Boy game ever”. What’s interesting is that many people have rediscovered the game in later years and opinions have softened, seeing it as a fun platformer with rather ugly graphics. Despite following the film far more closely with much higher production values, Capstone’s computer-based offerings also failed to impress, garnering distinctly average reviews across the board. Amiga Format complained that the game was, “Just too undemanding and unspectacular to merit the asking
price. It would be ideal for the younger players, but older dudes really needn’t bother.” The main quibble seemed to be that it was just far too easy and lacked any kind of serious challenge. The Atari Lynx version fared a little better than its rivals, getting some quite mixed reviews across the board. While some people loved it, proclaiming it as the Lynx’s first proper RPG, others didn’t seem to think it was well suited to a handheld, being too challenging and taking far too long to play. One thing is clear, the Bill & Ted games didn’t end up being as excellent as they could have been.
With the mixed response of the various Bill & Ted videogames, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that despite the relative success of the sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, no titles were produced for the follow-up with the licence being turned down by everyone it was offered to. An animated cartoon series also followed the films that featured the voices of the original cast, which proved fairly popular, as well as live-action series too, which featured none of the original cast, except Lisa Wilcox, and was less popular. Due to this, the live-action series was cancelled after just seven episodes by Fox. A third movie has often been talked about and both Reeves and Winter have never ruled it out, especially given the cult status the film now holds. To this day it remains ‘Certified Fresh’ on popular movie aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, with a rating of 78% and a score of 6.5/10, based on 45 reviews. The site’s critical consensus reads: “Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are just charming, goofy and silly enough to make this fluffy time travel Adventure work.” The film holds up better than most of the games do, so just remember dudes: “Party on and be excellent to each other!”