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Michael Jackson may have first made his name with some stunning music, but his show business longevity could be attributed mostly to personal strangeness, and regular stories in the media about elephant man’s bones, fascinating criminal investigations and sundry spectacles. Amid everything that he brought to entertainment, his contributions in music and film, not to mention his personal life, stands an obscure but important achievement in the area of video games: the Michael Jackson Moonwalker arcade game.

Around time that Michael Jackson’s Bad album came out, height of his career, the singer in collaboration with Sega the video game company, built on Jackson’s showbiz persona to create a video game named Moonwalker. The videogame is made in separate versions for arcade machines and for Sega Genesis home consoles. At the time, this was quite a groundbreaking idea, to give fans a celebrity a chance to experience his or her persona through the videogame, one that used real outtakes from the star’s CDs no less.

The premise of the game was that the player helped Michael Jackson’s character in the game heroically rescue children from a villain named Mr. Big. It can only be seen as ironic that Michael Jackson became embroiled in problems to do with crimes against children himself a few years after the game came out.

The arcade version of the game allowed up to two players to play the game at the same time, each in control of a Michael Jackson character dressed in white or red just the same as in his smooth criminal video. When Michael Jackson fought with the bad guys, his fighting steps were dance moves, and dispatching his enemies with its recognizable high-air dance kicks, spins and other trademark moves. A bit of Michael Jackson trivia that was popular at the time was the fact that he owned a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles; to bring a little bit more entertainment interests into the game, the chimp Bubbles was made a part of the game as well. If a player tries to pick the chimp up, Michael Jackson’s character would suddenly turn into robot can go about fighting with lasers.

The arcade game is quite an endearing and enduring cult hit; and manages somehow to sum up the feel of the early 90s. Animated outtakes from the game have been used for years all over to represent Michael Jackson on TV and on the Internet. The home game console version was much tamer than the arcade version. It was a bland game of the usual continually -scrolling background for which Michael Jackson did his fighting. Basically the game survived on its graphics of the dancelike fighting moves and the times that Jackson made and his signature high-pitched squeal when he succeeded. While the arcade version had real Michael Jackson music for the background, the home version was in town with nothing more than simplistic MIDI tunes of the stars famous Beat It and Smooth Criminal numbers.

There were precious few other video game appearances that Michael Jackson undertook: in space Channel 5 That for Sega’s Dreamcast home console, and in the boxing game Ready 2 Rumble. Not long before Michael Jackson passed away, there was talk of a videogame come back; it was rumored that there were going to be Michael Jackson games for the PlayStation and Wii consoles. It was however not be.