Everyone has their go-to Holiday movies to put on in the festive season, and one of the most popular Christmastime adventures is Home Alone, the 1990 comedy starring a young Macaulay Culkin. With a plot that revolves around Culkin's Kevin McCallister being left behind by his family at Christmas, and having to stop two thieves from robbing his house, Home Alone doesn't really naturally lend itself to the video game format, but that hasn't stopped developers giving it a go.
Movie tie-in games used to absolutely dominate the video game market, and while their golden age was the early 2000s, the 1990s had its fair share of movie tie-in titles. Both the original Home Alone and its sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, received several video game adaptations, with each console getting its own slightly different variation. While none of these games are perfect, they're certainly great for fueling Christmas nostalgia.
The Complete History of Home Alone Games
Released in 1991, Home Alone's first video game adaptation was for the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. This version sees players assuming the role of Kevin McCallister as he makes his way through the pixilated backgrounds of the McCallister family house, trying to avoid the Wet Bandits for a total of 20 minutes. The gameplay is pretty simple here, with players just being able to move Kevin left and right, and occasionally up a flight of stairs. Players can place traps for the burglars to fall into, and they can hide behind larger furniture like beds.
The SNES version of Home Alone (also released in 1991) has a similar premise to the NES version but has pretty different gameplay. While players are once again side-scrolling through the McCallister house, in this version they have to find all of the family's valuables, and drop them down a chute to the basement, all while avoiding Marv and Harry. After the player has collected all the valuables, they're tasked with getting to the safe in the basement, avoiding spiders, rats, and even ghosts along the way. The Game Boy version of Home Alone features almost identical gameplay to the SNES version, albeit with inferior visuals.
The Sega Genesis version of Home Alone, released a little later in 1992, takes another different approach to gameplay. This version of Home Alone involves two gameplay phases. The first of these sees players control Kevin as he sleds around his neighborhood from a top-down perspective, where he needs to locate the Wet Bandits as they rob a house. Entering the house transitions the game into a 2D side-scroller, similar to the other versions of the game. Here, Kevin needs to fill a "Pain" meter by hurting the thieves with weapons and traps.
In 1992, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York received its own video game adaptation for the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Genesis and MS-DOS. While the visuals, levels, and slight gameplay mechanics do vary in the different versions, they all follow the same general gameplay formula. In Home Alone 2, players control Kevin in a side-scrolling beat-em-up, where they continue traveling to the right side of the screen, avoiding enemies and obstacles and picking up coins. Players will encounter lobby boys at the Plaza Hotel, birds at Central Park, and eventually the Wet Bandits themselves. In 2006, a Home Alone game was released for PlayStation 2. Not really resembling any of the movies, this strange cash-grab of a game sees players traverse a top-down environment as they try to trap thieves and lock the doors behind them.