OK, so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.

But take a short trip with me into the past. A Mega Man poster hangs on a young boy’s largely undecorated walls, situated directly above a television to which an NES is connected. Inside the slot is a game called Home Alone, inspired by the Macaulay Culkin film of the same name. For weeks, this boy has been toiling away, repeatedly being caught by the Wet Bandits despite his best efforts. Completion of this game seems impossible.

In fact, he dreams one night of completing the game. He keeps one eye on the game’s timer as it expires, while the other watches for a last-second Wet Bandit ambush that never comes. Before he knows it, he has beaten the game. Dollar signs light up the screen as if he has won the jackpot at a casino. Victorious music plays, and he halfway anticipates a suited gentleman jumping out of the screen just to shake his hand and celebrate his triumph. Instead, he awakes with the dim light of morning flooding through his window, and the still uncompleted Home Alone waiting in his NES.

Only the truly difficult games can make a young boy dream of their completion. So, just what was it about Home Alone that made it so difficult? Well…I’ll take a shot in the dark here, but it might be the fact that it was inconceivably terrible. And the best part? It was developed by Bethesda Softworks. Yes, that Bethesda.




Home Alone was released for the NES in November of 1991. The basic premise of the game was the same as the movie: you’re a kid who was accidentally left at home by his parents, and you’re being chased by some home intruders. It’s up to you to remain in the house and fuck with the intruders rather than go seek help like a rational person.

I suppose it makes a bit of sense, as the police are slated to arrive 20 minutes after you start the game. The game actually has a twenty-minute timer that constantly counts down, and the sole aim is to stay uncaught for twenty minutes. That’s it. In essence, it’s a game that lasts for twenty minutes, at least in a perfect world. For those twenty minutes, however, you’re on your own against two dudes who walk really damn fast.

The game gives you plenty of tools with which to fend off the two bandits, including boxes with Christmas ornaments on them, boxes with light bulbs on them, and boxes with paint cans on them. Yes, you pick up these little symbols, and you set them down again. This temporarily incapacitates the bandits, giving you a chance to put some distance between you and them. And by incapacitate, I mean that they appear to melt into perfectly square bundles of limbs. It’s one of the most bizarre animations that I think I’ve ever seen. As a side note, the design and animation of the main character, Kevin, makes him look like he’s constantly riding an invisible bike. Occasinally, he’ll refuse to turn around when you want him too, and he’ll instead just backpedal. It looks like he’s fucking moonwalking. That is not a widely accepted method of avoiding home invaders, but I appreciate the creativity, Bethesda.



You also have a few hiding places in which you can take refuge. You can hide inside the Christmas tree, which is completely inconspicuous since your head sticks out the whole time. Yet the Wet Bandits will walk right by you…but only a total of two times. See, they’re only fooled twice by each of the game’s eight hiding spots, so once you’ve used them up, they become useless, and you’ll get nabbed if they walk by you. It might not sound like a big deal, but in twenty minutes, you’ll want to use hiding spots a lot more than that.

You also have the whole house that you can run through, including a pretty large basement, a tree house, and the outdoor area directly in front of the house. The various sections of the house are connected in a variety of ways that sort of make sense. You have staircases of course, which are surprisingly difficult to actually get the character to employ successfully. The front porch steps are especially great, as despite their rather large surface area, Kevin seems able to only use an extremely small portion of that area, and if you attempt to ask him to do anything differently, he’ll just stand there. If he does manage to mount the stairs, he walks up them at a speed that would make an amputee frustrated. Stairs is hard…



The main section of Kevin’s home and the tree house happen to be connected by a line that Kevin can climb across, which is a model of responsible parenting. Seriously, it’s a two-story fall, and it’s as if they thought, “Hey, we might as well train Kevin to be on Ninja Warrior one day!” Then again, I suppose Home Alone is one big critique of the modern family and its hands-off approach to parenting. Or it might just be a way to cash in on a cute little kid. Whatever.

So, what makes all of this nonsense so difficult? Well, if you can get past the punishing boredom of essentially running around in circles for twenty minutes straight, you’re presented with the harsh reality that you’ll be doing this for much, much more than just twenty minutes. See, there are no checkpoints in this game, and no forgiveness. If you happen to last for nineteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds, only to be caught, then it’s game over. You’ll start the game again with twenty minutes remaining.

This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t so infuriatingly easy to get caught. Little Kevin must suffer from some sort of degenerative leg disorder, because not only does he run like some sort of gremlin, he also does it far more slowly than the Wet Bandits. So, if one of those assholes is on your tail, you’re screwed unless you have an item handy.

Even worse is the inability to see where the two bandits are until they’re right on top of you. If you’re heading in one direction, and one of them comes at you from the other direction, you’ll be caught in a matter of milliseconds. The number of times that you’ll be running from one bandit only to have the other one appear directly in front of you is enough to make you want to kill a child. A specific child, but a child nonetheless.



So, just what level of difficulty will you experience in this game? Well, I’ll be impressed when I find a single person who finished this game on the NES. None of this emulator, save state crap that pervades YouTube. If you try to do this right, you will lose. This is not a game that you will beat. It will beat you. Most of the time, I was captured within two minutes. Two freaking minutes. Those times that I did manage to last about ten minutes were perhaps worse, because I knew that all that progress was immediately made meaningless.

It’s hard to know just what to say about a game like it. People still play it and post videos on YouTube, likely just to make the recurring nightmares from their childhood cease. It’s an absolutely terrible game, surpassed only by its sequel, Home Alone 2. If ever there were a game that I could call a waste of time, this is it.