Home Alone is the title of several tie-in video games based on the film of the same name written by John Hughes. Versions were released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Master System, Sega Genesis, Game Gear, Amiga, and MS-DOS platforms.

Plot and gameplay – Home Alone

There are multiple versions of the game and each features a different style of gameplay, but all share the same plot and roughly the same objective from the film: Kevin McCallister is left home alone when his family goes on Christmas vacation to Paris. He must prevent Harry and Marv, the “Wet Bandits”, from burgling his home, using various household objects as traps and/or weapons.

Versions – Home Alone

Super NES

In the Super NES version, the goal is to evade the Wet Bandits while bringing all the McCallister’s fortunes from the house down to the safe room in the basement. Once all items have been sent down the chute to the basement, Kevin must make it past rats, bats, spiders, and ghosts he encounters in the basement, then fight a boss so he can make it to the safe room to lock away all of his family’s riches.

Personal computer

In the Home Alone game for the PC, the player is given from 8:00 to 9:00 (approximately 5 minutes of real time) to set up traps in order to hurt the Wet Bandits once they arrive. No further setting of traps is possible after this period. Each trap can only be triggered once and they all inflict a single point of damage.

Marv and Harry arrive separately at the two entrances to the house. If the player touches either of Bandits, Kevin is caught and the game immediately ends in defeat. Hurting a Bandit ten times will permanently incapacitate him. The ultimate objective is to incapacitate both burglars.

The player can trigger their own traps, resulting in no harmful effects, but the trap will instantly disappear. If the player has too few remaining traps to sufficiently hurt each Bandit, the game will continue, but victory will be impossible. Following a game, the player may enter their names into a high score list. The position on the list is determined by whether the game was a win or a loss, by the time taken to defeat the Bandits, and by the total damage the player inflicted.

NES – Home Alone

In the version for the NES, the player must avoid being caught by Harry and Marv for 20 minutes. During this time, Kevin can set various traps using items scattered around the house, each with a different corresponding strength and allowing the person tripping them to be knocked unconscious longer. Kevin can also hide behind certain parts of the house, but only for two consecutive turns; any other concurrent passings will result in a game over.

Some copies of the NES version have two different “game over” screens; one having Kevin McCallister performing his trademark screaming face with a speech balloon on his left side that reads “Oh no!”, the other one only having a large cloud with “Oh no!” in the middle of it.

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