Here’s an interesting footnote to a Wikipedia entry on the 1981 horror film The Entity: “A video game based on the movie was created in 1983 for the Atari 2600, but never released.”

Where is this game?!!

If you haven’t seen The Entity starring Barabara Hershey then you might not know it is about demon rape. And the producers went to great lengths to show it. They even had ghostly fingers manipulating Barbara’s breasts.

So for there even to be consideration to make a video game based on this concept for the original Atari is mind boggling to me. With today’s “Grand Theft Auto” type games I could see it happening, but in 1981 video games were still pretty innocent. The biggest hit of course being “Pac Man.”

You also have to consider the graphics. Would ghost rape look good on a 2600?

Most likely the game had nothing to do with the film. There’s no way the marketing department would greenlight promoting a game that depicted rape of any kind. Still I would like to see the game. Some old programmer is sitting on it somewhere and it’s a shame that it has to be lost forever just because at one time it was denied distribution. This is the kind of game that should be released on the internet for the sake of geek history.

There may be hope for seeing this game yet. Due to the growing interest in retro-gaming this post suggests that The Entity video game will be dug up.

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