The Goonies
The Goonies is based on the Steven Spielberg film of the same name, in
which a motley crew of suburban kids in Astoria, Oregon, must save their homes
from being foreclosed upon and find their salvation in a treasure map leading
to an old pirate ship in a cavern. However, they must maneuver around an
eccentric family of Italian criminals — the Fratellis — on the lam, who are
also on the trail of the treasure.
The game is divided into a series of eight screens based on scenes from the
film, each of which contains puzzles that must be solved by coordinating the
activities of two of the kids from the Goonies (and in the last screen, the
elephant-man-like Sloth) without getting killed by deadly bats, homicidal
Fratellis, flying demon-skull thingies, or other environmental hazards. For
example, in one screen one player must wind up and hold a winch that lifts a
large stone so that the other player can pass it, run backward on a ball
floating in deadly water, bypass a series of three water buckets going up and
down that kill you if you do not time your passage underneath correctly, jump
to the top of a rail, and slide across to grab the key to the door below —
and all this without getting hit by a wandering bat.
The game keeps a score and a high score, and you have a certain number of
lives, which would be replenished at certain points or at certain score
totals, and there is no save feature. In other words, the game had to be
played all in one sitting, near-perfectly, to see the ending. The Goonies
can be played single-player, with the joystick button used to switch between
the two characters on-screen, or cooperatively, with each player controlling
one of the characters.
The Goonies are a group of kids or youths. Everything starts with an unscrupulous property shark who wants to purchase the kids' housing complex and the parents lack the money that is needed to prevent the pending sequestration.
In the house of their leader Mikey the group makes an unusual discovery. They find a treasure map which is supposed to lead to the hideout of "One-eyed Willie", a pirate.
Mikey can convince his friends to go for a treasure hunt. This starts in an abandoned restaurant. The evil Fratellis have settled in there. So after all Goonies, except for Chunk who is supposed to call the police, have entered a system of catacombs through a manhole in the restaurant, the adventure really begins. So the kids do not only have to beware of mean traps and bats, but also of Mama Fratelli.