I was messing around with the NES Friday the 13th and reading through the manual, and I realized its basically a digital board game.Camp Crystal Lake itself looks like the board. You manage a set of counselors like pieces on the board. The map has cabins and paths acting as spaces and edges. You draw and use item cards randomly in predetermined areas. Jason moves around like an automated enemy piece.Makes me wonder how many other NES games are like this that I'm not thinking of. Hell, people even used to call levels "boards".
I think a lot of these shitty nes games that japs were hired to make have interesting concepts one could build upon. Jaws is another one that could be the basis for a neat scuba adventure rpg where you hunt for treasure, or something like Festers Quest.
The precursor to video games is board games, naturally most early game designers designed vidya like glorified electronic board or card games, especially American designed ones... yes, I know this was developed in Japan, but I'm sure the actual planning was by Americans.
