Mr. Aykroyd is no gamer, but he was at least as impressed by Terminal Reality’s grasp of the Ghostbusters’ lingo and style as he was by their prowess with special effects. (There have been other Ghostbusters games, but none since the early 1990s.)
“In the beginning they came to me, and I said, ‘I encourage you, go ahead,’ ” he recounted. “They gave me the script. I took it. I rewrote it doing little tiny structural things, mostly bringing back the tone of the original dialogue and the vernacular — the terms, the idiom — but they really had it. Two-thirds of it was there. Then they gave it to Harold. He did the same thing.”
The game is being hawked by Atari as having been written by Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Ramis, but both men, in addition to the real writers at Terminal Reality, readily acknowledge that is mostly marketing bunk. “They were happy to have our involvement at all,” Mr. Ramis said. “The crassest way I can put it is that they couldn’t have paid us enough to give it the time and attention required to make it as funny as a feature film.”