Halloween: The Game, an officially licensed video game built directly on John Carpenter’s original 1978 slasher film, launched worldwide on September 8, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Michael Myers is a fully playable character in its 1-versus-4 multiplayer mode, decades after the movie that put him on screen for the first time.

Key Points

• Developed by IllFonic and published by IllFonic Publishing alongside Gun Interactive, the studio behind the long-running Friday the 13th: The Game, according to Notebookcheck.
• The team built the game with input from Carpenter himself and longtime franchise producer Malek Akkad, and it’s based specifically on the 1978 film rather than any of the franchise’s later sequels or reboots.
• Digital Deluxe Edition owners got early access starting September 4; the standard release followed September 8 at $39.99, with the Deluxe edition at $59.99.
• The single-player campaign runs six chapters told from Michael Myers’ point of view, while the asymmetrical multiplayer mode sets one player as Myers, using stealth and a teleport-style “Shape Jump” ability, against four players trying to warn Haddonfield residents and escape.

The 1978 film this game is built on is widely credited with more or less inventing the modern slasher movie as its own genre. Britannica describes it as a “seminal work” in the psycho-slasher subgenre that established the template later films would copy for decades: a masked killer stalking teenagers, built on tension and dread rather than graphic gore. Carpenter made the film on a modest budget and it went on to “record-breaking receipts” and near-immediate popularity, per Britannica, spawning a franchise that’s still generating new entertainment, in a new medium entirely, forty-eight years later.

Early reception has been mixed but not dismissive. Horror outlet Dread Central called the asymmetrical multiplayer “unusually strong” in its review of the game, praising the tension of playing as Myers even as it noted rough edges elsewhere. That kind of response tracks with a franchise that has always lived or died on tension over spectacle rather than body count.

Three multiplayer maps have rolled out so far, set in fictional Haddonfield locations built to echo the film’s quiet, tree-lined suburban streets: Haddonfield Heights, Haddonfield Town Center, and Orange Grove Estates. A game trying to earn the name “Halloween” was always going to be judged less on gore and more on whether it can replicate the specific, patient dread the 1978 original built its reputation on, and nearly five decades after Michael Myers first walked out from behind a hedge, he’s still the one everybody’s watching for.