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The haunted house is a staple of platform games since at least as far back as Super Mario World. Were they in Super Mario Bros 3 as well? I’d believe it if you told me they were, but I’m unsure, I think maybe it just had pyramid-style temples that had dry-bones? Either way, the thing about the haunted houses in the Mario games is that aesthetically they are right up my alley, but I don’t know that I ever especially enjoyed them as a kid. They tended to be places with tricky mazes and illusions and such that I sometimes struggled with. Still, I knew I needed one for Adventure Dennis, so here we go.
Page 1: If Dennis’s outfit here is a reference to anything, I forget what. I can say that I just think it looks cool and back when I was young and handsome I did have a black suit and tie and a deep blue shirt that could go with it.
Where does that cobweb go? It’s to the right of the window, but then when Dennis reaches the window it isn’t there. I think I will canonically say that between the first and second panels Dennis actually runs past that cobweb and reaches a second window. You can all calm down about the cobweb now.
Page 2: The enemy here, identified in the text as “the green thing” is not, as far as I can tell, a reference to anything from a game. What is it then? Well, back on the old Contains2 website we used to have a “splash page” image on the home page that would be changed up every couple months and one of them featured the green thing:
It’s neat to see a monster from Adventure Dennis depicted in a different context, but the fact that this file on my external hard drive was titled “monsterorghostorsomething.jpg” means it doesn’t tell me much more about it meant to be.
It throws a bomb that sticks to Dennis (the bomb being another thing to get a motion line) and it sticks to him. I am reasonably sure that around the time I was making Adventure Dennis there was a first-person shooter in which you could throw sticky bombs at the other players and I thought that was funny. That means this is another non-platformer reference, but at least this time I’m using it to simulate the time limit that levels had in Mario games.
Page 4: This hunchbback with the shovel was partially a reference to the “Flea Men” in the Castlevania games. Based on the name those guys were probably not meant to be human, but as a kid I always just thought they were Igor-style mad science guys. This guy here though, I saw as a more innocent groundskeeper of the haunted house who happened to get killed by Dennis. The “His family will miss him” bit is inspired by some deleted scenes from Austin Powers included on the DVD that showed Sir Powers killing henchmen and then cutting to their loved ones receiving the news.
Page 5: A painting where the eyes move is a staple of haunted houses in cartoons and stuff, but I don’t imagine it’s in a lot of games. One thing I don’t believe has ever been clear to anyone is that the guy in the painting is wearing a little red gem around his neck that is the gem that Dennis wins at the end of this level.
What’s more, on the occasions I’ve seen this page in the years since making it I’ve wondered if the ghost Dennis encounters here is the ghost of the guy in the painting. I’ve never settled in my own head if I like that idea enough to commit to it and, you know what, it might just not actually matter.
Page 7: Zombies are a generic enemy in games and always have been and always will be. I just had to fit them in. “Oh no! The dead have risen as four zombies!” is a sentence that amuses me.
The rest: The Jack O’Pumpkin, and the resulting smear when the bomb explodes, are some of the least pixel-styled stuff in here. A real missed opportunity.
I don’t know if the Jack O’Pumpkin is a reference to anything specific from games. It’s a fitting boss for a Haunted House level, I guess, but I wish I’d done something a little more specific. I’d say that between the goblins and snakes and zombies, a lot of the baddies in the first few levels are a little more generic than I’d now prefer. Maybe a cowardice to be too specific on the part of young PDR? Ah well, I’m pretty sure this is the second-last of the Adventure Dennis levels to go up in the Contains2 era, so lets see what is next.
