I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
As the first film was something of a surprise hit, there wasn’t a whole lot of tie-in merchandising apart from T-shirts (official and bootleg) with the famous Ghostbusters logo on them. There was a computer game, originally developed for the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 and later released for home systems.
The meat of the game, after the start-up screen and a digitised voice laughing and saying “Ghostbusters”, consisted of choosing an Ecto-mobile of your choice (compact, 1963 hearse, station wagon or high performance) and then tooling around New York in very simple top-down driving sections (with an absolutely huge car sprite) hoovering up any ghosts encountered. Capturing ghosts from hauntings was done on a separate screen as players tried to manoeuvre spirits using their proton streams above a trap without crossing them.
Once a set number of funds had been collected (the Ghostbusters had to balance the books as well as capture ghosts) the player had to try and enter spook central by passing beneath the legs of a hopping Stay Puft Marshmallow man. From personal experience with the commodore 64 version this was one of the most frustrating experiences of my young life. If you failed to get two Ghostbusters safely between the giant creatures legs and through the door, you had to start all over again. There was no save game. I never made it.
