A look back at Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt, an all but forgotten platformer based on an all but forgotten cartoon
The Addams Family: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt was destined for obscurity. It was a ho-hum action-platformer game made by a ho-hum developer, based on a ho-hum property. It’s still obscure today, at a point when seemingly any and every Super Nintendo game based on some sort of pre-existing franchise is championed by some niche corner of the internet.
A lot of things had to go wrong for Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt to turn out the way it did. Consider this article a people’s history of its inglorious conception and even more inglorious afterbirth.
Now, there were three official Addams Family games released on the SNES. There was one based on the 1991 movie, a movie based on the 1993 sequel Addams Family Values and this one, which is based on the Saturday morning cartoon that came out between the two live-action feature films.
You don’t hear a lot about the cartoon. Even then it was sorta instantly dated, ultra-forgettable kid-slop that really didn’t understand its own license. It ran for two unremarkable seasons and has virtually zero nostalgic fan base despite virtually EVERYTHING else from the ‘90s having one. Not even John Astin, the original Gomez, reprising his iconic role could save that thing; not that it stopped the cartoon from having a tidal wave of tie-in merchandise no one was interested in, from action figures to coloring books.
So naturally, it would get its own video game, too.
Now, the waters are already pretty muddy here. So let me muddy them some more. There are technically three different versions of Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt out there, including versions released on the ancient 8-bit NES and monochrome Game Boy handheld unit. In case you’re not confused enough, those two versions of Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt were literally mild re-edits of the previous Addams Family game based on the 1991 movie with Gomez swapped out for Pugsley. While structurally and thematically similar, at least the Super Nintendo version we’re focusing on today is a different game. Not that it’s a better one, per se, but at least they put some effort into giving it a style and flavor all its own.
Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is an easy game to explain and a difficult one at the same time. It’s basically just another Mario and Sonic imitation, where you run around jumping over bottomless pits and avoiding enemies who instantly kill you just by brushing up against them. It sorta takes advantage of the property and incorporates a few elements from the cartoon, but they’re very superficial things with very little bearing on the gameplay itself. You could also change the sprites for the Addams Family characters and replace them with anything else and it really wouldn’t change the atmosphere and tone of the game whatsoever. Which kinda defeats the purpose of making a video game based on a cartoon series, but whatever, man.
The game has something of an exploration-adventure aspect, but not really. Instead of stages you have various doors you can enter in the Addams Family manor, and at the beginning of the game you pretty much have free rein to go wherever you want (with a few exceptions.) The order you “clear” the stages, though, doesn’t actually impact the game the same way it does similar “choose your own path” games like Mega Man and Metroid. There are no level specific power-ups or upgrades, and your character maintains the same stats, attributes and weaknesses from the start of the game until the very end. I guess you could say Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is old-school, but not exactly old-school in a good way.
There’s not a lot of surprises here. The game throws a gauntlet of creepy, spooky and occasionally kooky enemies at you, although the designs are hardly all that inspired. The game suffers from some VERY clunky controls and some especially egregious hit detection issues (which is geek speak for “the enemies deal damage to you even when you’re not that close to them.) In a game that’s 90 percent jumping over stuff, the most aggravating part of the title is — you guessed it — the jumping. Just wait until you make it to the final level, where everything is iced over and it makes leaping from platform to platform nearly impossible. What glorious game design, huh?
Speaking of substandard programming, the game also throws a lot of irritating block puzzles at you — i.e., these stretches where you have to hit certain switches in certain numerical sequences to unlock doors and exit levels. It is extraordinarily frustrating and tedious and is seemingly only included in the game to make sure you don’t beat the whole game in about 40 minutes. All I can say is that if you squandered a Blockbuster weekend rental on this one, you’ve got my sympathies.
Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt is clearly a bad game, but I’m not sure if it’s a notably bad game. It sucks, but it doesn’t suck hard or differently enough to make it stand out from all of the other terrible Mario clones on the SNES. Pretty much the only thing that makes it worth experiencing at all is the threadbare Addams Family cartoon aesthetics and even then it kinda feels like an afterthought. But hey, the music is unironically catchy, if that’s worth anything to you.
It’s forgettable, but I suppose it is playable. And with so many horror and horror-adjacent games on the SNES to choose from this Halloween season, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to begin with one of the subjectively lesser ones first. I mean, it can only go up from here — right?
