Every Jason Voorhees game: from the ZX Spectrum and NES to Dead by Daylight

Jason Voorhees has been in nine official video games. The first came out in 1986 on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad, and the latest landed on 16 June 2026, when Jason finally joined Dead by Daylight. In between there's the NES game, Mortal Kombat X, his own Friday the 13th: The Game, a puzzle game, a Warner Bros. fighter, Call of Duty and Fortnite. Here are all nine in order: who made each one, what Jason does in it, and which ones you can still play, because two of the nine can no longer be bought.

Most lists online are out of date. They tell you Jason isn't in Dead by Daylight, which was true until June 2026. They date the Domark game to 1985, the year it was only announced. Some put him in Funko Fusion and Mortal Kombat 1, where he never appeared. I checked dates and roles against Wikipedia, Spectrum Computing, Steam, the Call of Duty blog and Behaviour's own pages. Critic scores come from Metacritic, reviews and prices from Steam as of 5 October 2026. The full table is near the end.

ZX Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad, 1986: Jason hides among your friends

The first game was made and published by British label Domark. Crash magazine announced it in its December 1985 issue, and it reached shops in 1986 on cassette for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. The Spectrum version cost £8.95. Domark said it based the game on Part 2.

The idea was sneakier than you'd expect from 1986. Jason doesn't stomp around the camp in his mask. He's disguised as one of your friends. You wander between the cabins, the barn and the church, pick up weapons and try to work out who isn't who they say they are. Hit the right person and he turns into a figure in black. Your fear level is shown by a blonde woman's face in the corner of the screen: the more scared you are, the higher her hair stands up.

The press hated it. Zzap!64 gave it 13%, Your Sinclair 3 out of 10, Crash 32%, and a year later Crash listed it among the worst film tie-ins. The launch party was better than the game, though. At a press event in the cellar of the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in London, Domark co-founder Dominic Wheatley burst in dressed as Jason, cleaver in hand.

You can't buy it anywhere today. It was never re-released on any platform.

NES, February 1989: purple Jason and his mother's head in a cave

The second game was published by LJN and developed by Atlus, which one of its own testers later confirmed. It came out in North America only, in February 1989. No reliable source gives a day, only the month.

You play six counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, each with their own speed, jump and throwing strength, and you start with nothing but rocks. You run along trails between cabins, caves and the lake, fighting off zombies, crows and wolves. Whenever Jason attacks the children or another counselor, an alarm goes off and you have to get there before he does.

Inside the cabins the game switches to a first-person view and the fight with Jason plays a bit like Punch-Out!!. You need to last three days and three nights and beat him three times. And in a locked room inside a cave, his mother Pamela Voorhees waits for you as a floating head.

Jason wears a purple and teal outfit here, and that look outlived the game. In 2017 it came back as the Retro Jason skin in Friday the 13th: The Game, handed to every player as an apology for the rough launch. The game itself has a bad name. EGM ranked it the eighth worst console game ever in 1997, and in 2006 the Angry Video Game Nerd made an episode about it that plenty of people saw long before they saw the game. There's no Metacritic page and no re-release, just the original cartridges.

26 years without a game, and the Freddy vs. Jason game that never shipped

After the NES, Jason vanished from games for 26 years. For the Freddy vs. Jason film, David Bergantino pitched Freddy vs. Jason: Hell Unbound: both killers stuck in Hell, up to four players, as Freddy or as Jason. It was planned for Dreamcast and PS2, later Xbox, but the film kept slipping and the game was dropped. Dustin McNeill tells the full story in his 2017 book "Slash of the Titans".

Kane Hodder, who played Jason in four films, said in 2015 that about twelve years earlier he'd done motion capture for a killer in a similar game that got shelved. He didn't name it, so I won't tie his words to Hell Unbound, tempting as the timing is.

Fan databases list a 2007 Java phone game called Friday the 13th from Xendex. I couldn't confirm it with the publisher, so it doesn't count here. Neither do fan games like Terrordrome and Return to Camp Blood.

Mortal Kombat X, May 2015: Jason for $4.99

It was a fighting game, not a horror game, that brought Jason back. NetherRealm announced him in March 2015 as one of four Kombat Pack fighters, alongside the Predator, Tanya and Tremor. Pack owners got him on 5 May, at first only on Xbox One, with PS4 and PC running late. He went on sale on his own on 12 May for $4.99.

He doesn't talk, only grunts and the sound of the machete, which is fair enough for Jason. The game is still on sale. On Steam it's listed as Mortal Kombat X, though what you get is the XL version with every fighter. Full price is $19.99, Jason is $4.99 on his own, and on 5 October both were discounted to $3.99 and $1.49.

He isn't in the 2023 Mortal Kombat 1, whatever some lists say. Its guests were Omni-Man, Peacemaker, Homelander, Ghostface, the T-1000 and Conan.

Friday the 13th: The Game, May 2017: Kane Hodder, a lawsuit and a delisting

This is the only big game with Jason as the star. It started on Kickstarter under the name Summer Camp, and the campaign ended on 13 November 2015, a Friday, of course. The goal was $700,000. IllFonic and Gun Media made it with people from the films themselves: producer Sean S. Cunningham, makeup artist Tom Savini, composer Harry Manfredini, and Kane Hodder doing Jason's motion capture.

It launched on 26 May 2017 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One for $39.99. Seven players are counselors and one is Jason. The counselors fix a car, look for fuel, call the police or just hide under a bed. Jason can teleport around the map, hears every noise, and each film version of him, from Part 2 to Part 9, has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Then it went sideways. In June 2018 Gun said new content was on hold because Victor Miller, who wrote the first film, was suing Cunningham over the rights to the script. Miller won, and the appeals court settled it for good in 2021, but by then it was too late for the game. Uber Jason from Jason X and the Grendel spaceship map never came out. The last big addition was the single-player challenges on 24 May 2018.

The rest by date. The Switch version came out in August 2019. In November 2020 the dedicated servers were switched off and matches moved to peer-to-peer. The game was delisted on 31 December 2023 and the online side went dark on 31 December 2024. Progress and unlocks lived in that same database, so since then many owners can't get past a "Database login failure" error, even for the bot mode. Some say their bots still load, so it's a coin toss. A fan relaunch called Resurrected got a cease and desist from the rights holder in April 2024.

The funny part is that players love it: 80% positive out of 76,811 Steam reviews. Critics were harder on it, 61 on PC and PS4 and 53 on Xbox One. The same studio and publisher used the same formula for Michael Myers in 2026, and I went through what worked and what didn't in my Halloween: The Game review.

Killer Puzzle, 2018: the puzzle game that vanished from every store

The odd one out. Blue Wizard Digital, the studio of PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka, took its own Slayaway Camp and put Jason in it. You get isometric levels where Jason slides across the grid until he hits something, and you have to plan your moves to reach every victim without falling into the lake. The episodes take him far from Crystal Lake, all the way to prison and space, just like the films did.

It came out on phones on 20 January 2018 and on Steam on 12 April, then on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. The license wasn't renewed and on 23 January 2023 the game was pulled from every store. In the days before that Steam gave it away for free, so a lot of people still have it in their library. It has 94% positive out of 6,073 Steam reviews, the best score of any Jason game.

MultiVersus, Black Ops 6 and Fortnite, 2024-2025: Jason as a guest

Since 2024 Jason has turned up in someone else's game every year. In MultiVersus, Warner Bros.' platform fighter, he was a playable fighter from the full launch on 28 May 2024. A year later, on 30 May 2025, the servers were shut down. Offline play stayed for anyone who logged in during Season 5, but you can't unlock Jason any more.

In October 2025 he came to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone with The Haunting season. The store had a bundle with classic Jason and a new "tactical" one, and in the Slasher Deathmatch mode two players became Jasons with a machete and an axe. The last survivor standing got a pickaxe that could kill him. He isn't in Black Ops 7, though some lists say he is.

In Fortnite he arrived for Fortnitemares 2025: the Haunted Cup on 16 October gave the outfit to top players first, and the bundle hit the Item Shop on 17 October. This year Fortnite went with Freddy Krueger instead, and I covered that in every Freddy Krueger game.

Dead by Daylight, 16 June 2026: Jason finally joins the big one

Fans had been asking Behaviour for Jason for years. He was missing from Dead by Daylight for almost a decade, even though Michael Myers arrived in 2016, Freddy in 2017 and Ghostface in 2019. The reveal in May 2026 was a good one: 13 hours of livestream showing a cabin in the woods, then the teaser. The public test opened on 26 May, and on 16 June, for the game's tenth anniversary, the Jason chapter came out as Chapter 40 with patch 10.0.0.

It's an unusual chapter: just the killer, The Slasher, with no new survivor and no map. It's $4.99 on Steam. His power is called Omnipresent Evil. Jason becomes invisible and undetectable, but he loses sight of survivors and scratch marks too, keeping only footprints. From that state he can use Jump Scare: look at a pallet, breakable wall or window and instantly appear there to break it or vault it. The other ability is Impaling Throw. Jason grabs debris from scrap piles or hooks, throws it, and can pin a survivor to a wall.

His perks are Hex: Scared To Death, Silent Shadow and Rampage, which stacks up to 13 tokens, naturally. On Steam the chapter has 81% positive out of 1,345 reviews. Freddy's chapter sits at 65%, so Jason got a much warmer welcome. Every other killer, with powers and maps, is in my full list of Dead by Daylight killers.

Every Jason Voorhees game: the table

What's missing and why. Funko Fusion: no Jason, though it has Chucky and Freddy Fazbear. Mortal Kombat 9, 11 and 1: no Jason either, the 2011 game had Freddy. The May 2025 headlines about Friday the 13th: The Game "coming back" were about merchandise, not the game. Rights holder Horror Inc. has been promising a new game since Comic-Con in July 2025, and in October that year said it was "actively" in the works, but there's still no studio, title or date.

Scores and reviews: critics against players

Metacritic scores cover the whole game, so Mortal Kombat X wins thanks to the rest of its roster. The more interesting thing is that Jason's own game, Friday the 13th: The Game, is the one critics liked least.

Players disagree with the critics, though. The Game has 80% positive reviews on Steam, nearly level with the Dead by Daylight chapter, even after almost two years off sale.

Where to play as Jason, or against him, in 2026

Of the nine games, you can buy two outright today. The rest are either delisted or were limited-time events. Pick by what you want:

My pick is Dead by Daylight, and not just because it's new. It's the first game in nine years where Jason is the main event and has a future, not a server shutdown date.

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