If You’ve Ever Wanted to Kill Kevin From ‘Home Alone,’ You Can
It’s a scene that’s burned into the memories of everyone who watched Home Alone as a child — the Wet Bandits have Kevin McCallister hanging from a coat hook after they endured medieval-level torture at the hands of his increasingly barbaric booby traps. Joe Pesci pries Macaulay Culkin’s fingers from his clenched fist and fits to bite them off the child’s hand one at a time before Old Man Marley saves the day and delivers knockout blows to the burglars with his trusty snow shovel.
If you’ve ever wondered late at night about what might have happened if Kevin’s mysterious, misjudged neighbor hadn’t arrived in the nick of time to save Kevin from the Wet Bandits, the 1991 Home Alone Game Boy game has the answer — they fucking kill Kevin. In a recently rediscovered screenshot of the “Game Over” screen from the tie-in game for the John Hughes Christmas classic, Kevin’s lifeless body hangs from the coat hooks as Marv and Harry smugly pose for the camera with the crowbars they presumably just used to murder an eight-year-old boy.
The single-player action game was released on six different platforms between 1991 and 1992 to almost universally negative reviews. At the time, the game was dismissed as a lazy cash-grab designed to milk more money out of a popular piece of IP. However, the game and its sequel enjoyed a second life as a cult classic due to the diligent efforts of James Rolfe, better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd, who made it his life’s mission to preserve the awfulness of early-era games like Home Alone.
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Rolfe even recruited Culkin to help him play through the various versions and adaptations of the game for a holiday special back in 2018. Notice that real-life Culkin still has all of his fingers, unlike his unsuccessful Game Boy counterpart.
Today, the Home Alone game stands as a reminder that soulless tie-ins can take a beloved piece of media and turn its scariest scene into pure nightmare fuel. However, the scarring image of Kevin’s corpse hanging from the infamous coat hook in all of its pixelated horror does make us immensely more grateful for Old Man Marley and his shovel.
He can salt his driveway with the corpse of this awful game for all we care.
