In 1985, gaming tried—and failed—to come to terms with Stephen King

King has dominated almost every artistic medium of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Mist explains why gaming is the rare exception.

By William Hughes | October 30, 2025 | 9:00am

Photo: Mindscape

Books Features Horrors Week

In 1985, gaming tried—and failed—to come to terms with Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most adapted authors on the planet, with huge chunks of his prodigious output having been churned up, reworked, and then ultimately extruded as movies, TV shows, comic books, and more. There’s really only been one exception to the gluttonous way that King’s inventive plots and compelling, slightly folksy prose have been devoured by non-native artistic mediums over the decades: Video games, which have always kept the master author at a mildly indifferent remove. (A mutual one, if Uncle Stevie’s writings about games in his old Entertainment Weekly column are anything to go off of.) There have been efforts to adapt, but only sporadically: A run-and-gun platformer based on the film version of Bachman Book The Running Man here, an adventure game loosely based on The Dark Half there, the ridiculous “Slap Steve’s name on it and ship the sucker off” goofiness of minigame collection F13: The Function Of Fear sitting on an eternally ignored Office Max spinner rack over there. (Ah, F13: The “game” that dared to ask, “What if your keyboard had a 13th function key… of terror?!”) Absolutely none of these games had any interest in wrestling, in any meaningful way, with King’s actual strengths and weaknesses as an author, and how those might be applied to an interactive medium—except one. The first one. The Mist.

This is not an apologia for Angelsoft’s 1985 text adventure The Mist, which is not a good game by either the standards of our time, or its own. (Replaying it this week, I was baffled to be reminded that it was contemporaneous with Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, a game that demolishes it on both an artistic and a technological level.) Presented entirely in text, the game is both simplistic and clunky, demanding players navigate its ransacked grocery store and ravaged city streets not just through text prompts, but ones so fussy that they’d put the original novella’s minor villain Brent Norton to shame. This is a text parser that will all but call you an asshole for typing “search Dumpster” into it, because it’s actually waiting for “look at Dumpster closely”—no adverb, no love. And yet, as the very first video game to adapt King—and one of the only ones to directly incorporate parts of his prose—it remains a fascinating look at why his themes might sit so ill at ease with the realm of interactive entertainment.

Most Popular

It’s worth noting that King’s 1980 novella was nobody’s first choice for adaptation: When approached by Angelsoft founder (and fellow author) Mercer Mayer about possible game rights, King (then a decade into his career as literature’s “King Of Horror”) simply explained that basically every other work he’d published up to that point had already been optioned for film. On the surface, though, it wasn’t a terrible fit: The novella, published in short story collection Skeleton Crew, has the loose structure of an adventure story. (Even if that’s mostly in place so that King can set his “heroes” up to fail at every turn.) It has clear, present dangers to battle. And it has all sorts of ugly pressures and ticking clocks to bring to bear on a player, from the hordes of creatures roaming the titular fog, to the steadily winding cuckoo clocks in their fellow survivor’s heads. The Mist, as written, is a swiftly brewing recipe for disaster. Why not use it as a template for a horror game?

And there are moments of playing the game—which has been archived in the Internet Archive, for the curious—where its efforts to adapt King undeniably work. Walking through the grocery store (navigating screen by screen by typing “north,” “south,” “east,” “west,” etc. into the interface), the tension is palpable. Walk into the store’s meat locker, and you’ll be confronted with the hanging corpses of soldiers from the mysterious Project Arrowhead, having somehow impaled themselves on meat hooks to get out of this world while the getting was good. Step into the store’s storage area, and you’ll be treated to the sight of poor, dumb Norm the bagboy getting dragged to his death by a massive, suction cup-covered tentacle. And that’s to say nothing of what can happen when you go outside yourself, where you’re certain to swiftly encounter the gigantic, otherworldly “bugs” and “birds” that populated King’s Mist. Meet one without the proper tools already on hand, and you’ve already signed your death warrant: The creature will block your exit, then proceed to messily murder you with methods culled straight from the many deaths in King’s writing, before the game “reassures” you that “The nightmare is over, for now…”

These early portions—i.e., before the game has any real obligation to be a “video game”—are where it shines brightest, serving as a spooky tour of an impending apocalypse. In that sense, the game’s workmanlike prose serves as a strength, declaring “The Bird is here” with a bluntness that underscores how horrifying the only-vaguely-avian beast in front of you really is. It’s only once you’re expected to actually get stuff done that the game begins to betray its source material a bit, because accomplishing things isn’t really what King’s The Mist is about.

Written in the aftermath of a massive storm that swept his native Maine, The Mist, like many of King’s early works, fixates at least in part on the impossible hell of being a parent. That is, of being tasked, down to your very soul, with keeping something precious and fragile safe in a fundamentally unsafe world. The story’s protagonist, David Drayton, is a good man, mostly: A little quick to anger, a little too gleeful to see a smug sumbitch get taken down a few pegs. But he loves his son, Billy—something that only contributes to, rather than lessens, the story’s horror. (If not to the cruel extent that King’s favorite adapter, Frank Darabont, took it to in his 2007 film adaptation of the story. Although, if we’re being honest, we’d be hard-pressed to name many stories more cruel than Darabont’s The Mist.) Billy isn’t with you in the game, which instead makes returning to your home to save him the main reason for the player-David to take all these excessive risks. It’s possible his presence would simply have been too upsetting for players: You read a lot of descriptions of your body being torn apart, melted, and otherwise destroyed while playing The Mist, and having those apply to the six-year-old boy you’d failed to protect would probably be a bridge too far. But his absence undercuts one of the key themes of King’s novella.

At the same time, your player-David accomplishes any number of things that King makes clear would be utter suicide for the protagonists of his story, whose fitful efforts to accomplish anything typically produce nothing more than a rising body count. Playing the game, you walk through the Mist, gun down monsters (once you’ve soothed a pistol away from supermarket manager Ollie Weeks, much reduced from his quietly lovely brand of heroism in the story), and generally operate like a video game protagonist. The most jarring change comes right at the game’s end, when you’re confronted with the creature it describes only as “The Giant Thing.” In King’s novella, this creature served to underscore how humanity has become the bottom of an elaborate and hideous new food chain, passing between the legs of a beast so massive and hideous that David and his son’s only safety is that they’re beneath its inhuman notice. In the game, you load up a bugsprayer with a secret military pesticide and spray it a few times. Problem solved!

The horror of Stephen King has always grown at the intersection between those things humanity has control over, and those it doesn’t. The Mist, which ends on a mild note of distant, flickering hope, isn’t quite Cujo or Pet Sematary-level cruel about this stuff. (Unless, again, you’re dealing with Darabont.) But it’s still fascinated by the ways humanity curdles in the face of its own powerlessness. And the game does interface with this material, at least superficially. (For instance, it’s careful to adapt Mrs. Carmody, the pantsuited “witch” who whips her supermarket cult into sacrificial madness with cries for “Expiation!” almost word-for-word.) But, written and designed as it was in 1985, it also can’t reckon with a video game universe where all its hero ever manages to do is discover the exact limits of how badly he’s screwed. With its guns, and its bug sprayers, and even a very silly bit where you dose a murderous bug with salt, it fails to embrace the powerlessness that rests at the core of King’s horror.

Which is part of what makes it a minor tragedy that gaming has largely abandoned King as a direct reference, instead adapting his themes only through indirect or winking nods in games like Silent Hill. The strange paradox is that the medium caught up to King’s brand of storytelling right around the time it gave up on adapting the man itself, leaving one of the genuinely great horror authors of his generation unsatisfyingly untapped. It’s easy to imagine some small development team making the most of The Mist now, suffusing the story with dread, embracing David’s ultimate powerlessness, and reminding you at every turn of how fragile humanity is. You could make a game with this story hurt, the way King makes it hurt, as he slowly whittles down whatever goodness is left in people as the monsters begin to encroach. Instead, we’ve just got The Mist (1985): An evolutionary dead end, with no real chance to survive.