Rent a copy of The Goonies II from the video store in 1987 and you’d come home expecting a straightforward licensed cash-in. There was never a movie called “Goonies 2.” There still isn’t. Konami simply decided the story wasn’t finished, borrowed the Fratelli family and the kid actors’ characters from the 1985 film, and built a sequel to a sequel nobody had asked for. It shouldn’t have worked. It mostly does.
Konami released The Goonies II in Japan in March 1987 and brought it to North America that November, with a European release following in late 1988. Director Hitoshi Akamatsu and designer Yoshiaki Yamada built it as a follow-up to an earlier Famicom Goonies game that most American kids never actually saw at home — it only reached the United States as an arcade cabinet on Nintendo’s VS. System. So the “II” in the title wasn’t referencing the movie at all. It was referencing a game.
The plot picks up with the Fratellis back out of prison, this time grabbing most of the Goonies and a new character, a mermaid named Annie, and stashing them somewhere in a sprawling cave complex. You play Mikey, and your job is simple on paper: find your friends, free them one at a time, and get to Annie before the Fratellis do.
What makes the game memorable is the way it splits in two. Most of the map plays like a side-scrolling action platformer, with Mikey running, jumping, and fending off the Fratellis using a yo-yo, a slingshot, and a boomerang, backed up by bombs and Molotov cocktails for emergencies. Walk through a door, though, and the game quietly swaps genres on you. You’re suddenly in a first-person room, picking from a text command menu to search, talk, or use items — the same structure Shadowgate leaned on a year later. It’s an odd pairing of styles for 1987, closer to an early Metroidvania crossed with a point-and-click adventure than anything else on the console at the time.
That hybrid structure is also where the game gets genuinely brutal. Some of the puzzles border on unfair by modern standards. One key item only shows up if you walk up to a specific old woman and strike her five times in a row — no hint, no clue, just trial and error or a well-worn strategy guide. Gamasutra later included the game on a list of notable open-world titles while noting, accurately, that it “basically requires a strategy guide to finish.” Reviewers at the time were kinder than that might suggest: Computer and Video Games scored it 81%, and it holds up as one of the better movie-adjacent games of the NES era, which says more about the competition than you might think — a point we got into when ranking NES movie and TV tie-in games a few weeks back.
Every Goonie you rescue adds to Mikey’s health bar, which gives the back half of the adventure a nice momentum: the more friends you free, the tougher you can afford to be. Lose all your lives and the game hands you a password instead of forcing a restart, a small mercy that mattered a lot before save batteries were standard.
For collectors, The Goonies II sits in a comfortable middle tier. It’s not a Black Box rarity and it’s not scarce the way some late-run titles are, but complete-in-box copies with the manual and intact cardboard still draw real interest, since Konami’s early NES output tends to hold value better than most third-party library filler. If you’re trying to figure out where a cartridge like this lands, our gallery of graded games is a good place to see what condition actually looks like across a grading scale.
Thirty-plus years later, the strangest part of The Goonies II still isn’t the five-hit old woman or the sudden shift into text commands. It’s that an entire generation grew up assuming there was a movie to go with it. There wasn’t. Konami just went ahead and made the sequel themselves.