Great Game Stories, No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly)

Once upon a summer, two children were packed off to camp, as children so often are in stories that are about to go horribly wrong. This is the tale of Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly, released for the Game Boy by Acclaim in 1991, and the very first time Springfield's finest troublemaker was ever shrunk down to fit inside a Nintendo handheld. It is a fairy tale of a wicked warden, a captured sister and a boy who simply refuses to be miserable on command.

Summer camp, but make it a survival story. Cowabunga.

The Characters

Our hero is Bart Simpson, ten years old and armed chiefly with attitude and quick reflexes. Where a fairy-tale knight might carry an enchanted sword, Bart makes do with dodging, ducking, jumping and stubbornly refusing to be made unhappy, which turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do at this particular camp. He is the spirit of mischief itself, dropped into a place designed to crush every last drop of fun out of him.

His clever little sister Lisa comes along on the trip too, and before very long she becomes the captive at the heart of the story, the princess in the tower who must be found and freed before the tale can end. The villain of the piece is Ironfist Burns, a nephew of Springfield's own miserly Mr. Burns and every bit as rotten as his infamous uncle. He runs Camp Deadly with a single guiding ambition: to make certain the children suffer, have as little fun as is humanly possible, and are not permitted to leave until they are thoroughly, gloriously wretched.

Standing between Bart and freedom is a whole rogues' gallery of camp counselors and two particularly dedicated bullies, Blindside Bill and Rebound Rodney, who chase and harry our hero at every single turn. They are the goblins of this fairy tale, forever underfoot, forever spoiling for trouble.

The World

Camp Deadly is no ordinary summer retreat, and the game makes that clear from its very first screen. It begins in a forest, where the morning's supposedly cheerful activity, a friendly game of capture the flag, has been quietly turned into a gauntlet of angry, swarming bees, hostile counselors and lurking, grinning bullies. Fun here is a trap, and every meadow hides a sting.

UK Version Complete in Box

What makes Camp Deadly such a wickedly good setting is that it takes every warm and familiar thing about summer camp and quietly poisons it. The games are traps, the meals are ambushes, the counselors are jailers and the cheerful painted signs promising fun read like grim little jokes. It is a child's-eye vision of the worst holiday imaginable, and Ironfist Burns has engineered every last detail of it purely to break the spirits of the youngsters in his charge.

From the woods the tale moves indoors to the mess hall at lunchtime, a dining room straight out of a nightmare, where the counselors fling knives and forks clean across the room at any child unwise enough to feel hungry. Beyond the camp itself rises Mount Deadly, a whole mountain to be climbed and crossed, and on its far side waits another stretch of shadowed forest and, humming ominously in the distance, a lonely power station.

The Adventure

Bart's ordeal plays out as a series of narrow escapes, each nastier than the last. First he must survive the forest game of capture the flag, threading his way through the swarming bees and past the taunts and shoves of Blindside Bill and Rebound Rodney. Then comes the dreaded lunch break, and a desperate dash through the mess hall while cutlery whistles past his ears like arrows.

Along the way the game never lets Bart forget where he is. The bees do not tire, the bullies do not quit, and the counselors patrol their stations with grim devotion to the cause of childhood misery. Each stage is a fresh test of timing and nerve, a small obstacle course dressed up as a summer activity, and clearing one only earns Bart the right to face the next indignity Camp Deadly has prepared for him. It is a platformer, yes, but one wearing the costume of the holiday from the underworld.

Together the children hatch a plan to flee, climbing up and over the great bulk of Mount Deadly toward the promise of freedom on the far side. But partway through the escape the story suddenly darkens. Ironfist Burns snatches poor Lisa away into captivity, and in an instant Bart's cheeky romp becomes something far more serious: a genuine rescue mission, with his own sister as the prize.

Spoiler Alert: How It Ends

Bart tracks his kidnapped sister and her captor all the way to the power station that keeps the whole of Camp Deadly running. There, in the story's final confrontation, he faces Ironfist Burns head on, defeats the scheming nephew at last and frees Lisa from his grasping clutches. The tyrant of the camp is beaten by a ten-year-old with a slingshot's worth of nerve.

Reunited, brother and sister then do the single most satisfying thing imaginable. Together they find a great switch inside the station and throw it, cutting the power to the entire rotten camp in one glorious stroke and bringing their miserable summer stay to an abrupt and triumphant end. The lights of Camp Deadly flicker and die, the gates fall open, the children go free, and Bart Simpson, for once in his mischievous life, is unambiguously and completely the hero. Happily ever after, Springfield style.

Fancy meeting the cartridge that sent Bart off to the worst summer camp in all of gaming? Visit the Game Boy Museum and find it waiting among the shelves of handheld history, ready to tell its story all over again.