The Origins of Destruction : Everything You Need to Know About Rampage
If you hung out in arcades or fired up the floppy disk drive of your microcomputer back in the late 80s, this name is bound to give you chills. Today, we are dusting off those red and black joysticks to talk about an absolute monument of video game carnage : Rampage. And we are skipping the subtlety, because we are here to smash bricks and level skyscrapers.
Before crashing into our bedrooms on the Amstrad, Rampage originally dropped as an action video game in August 1986, developed and published by Bally Midway for arcades. Designed by Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman, the title draws direct inspiration from the greatest monster movies. The goal is simple, incredibly satisfying and a massive departure from the standards of that era : destroy cities and fight off military forces while fighting to stay alive.
The Cast of Abominations
Up to three players can take control of humans who mutated into giant animal creatures following bizarre laboratory accidents. Here is our cheerful trio of mutants :
- George : a scientist transformed into a King Kong-like gorilla due to the effects of experimental vitamins.
- Lizzie : a woman turned into a massive reptile (highly reminiscent of Godzilla) after swimming in a lake contaminated with radioactive waste.
- Ralph : a gigantic werewolf, transformed after unknowingly eating a hot dog loaded with a mysterious food additive.
Gameplay Built on Massive Demolition
The game unfolds over a massive 128 days, tearing through various cities across North America, starting in Peoria, Illinois, and ending up in Plano, Illinois. Once this cycle is complete, it repeats five times, adding up to a theoretical total of 768 days before the game finally resets.
The core gameplay loop is brilliantly simple :
- The player can climb any building, smash it to pieces and eventually reduce it to a pile of rubble.
- You can eat non-playable humans to regain health, and completely obliterate helicopters, tanks, taxis, police cars, boats and trolleybuses.
- The monsters take damage from bullets, dynamite, punches from other monsters, lightning strikes or taking a hard fall. If the health bar hits zero, the monster shrinks back into a naked human and shuffles off the screen.
- Smashing windows reveals items that can be helpful (food or cash) or incredibly dangerous (bombs, electrical appliances, cigarettes). Special shoutout to the photographer you have to gobble up fast before he blinds your monster with his camera flash, sending you plummeting to the ground.
🕹️ Quick development fact : although Lizzie looks exactly like Godzilla, designer Brian Colin clarified that she was actually inspired by the Ymir monster from the movie 20 Million Miles to Earth, simply because Godzilla would have been way too massive to fit the game's strict size limits.
The LBC Take : Our Childhood Memories on the Amstrad
Rampage belongs to that special era of games I played when I was just a little kid. My brother and I would boot up the Amstrad 6128+ and slide the floppy disk in. Then we typed Run"disk or Run"Rampage. The game would load, and that iconic music kicked in instantly. If you listen to it, you will have it stuck in your head for hours. Okay, maybe that is because it was the only track in the game... but it was incredibly cool ! And just like that, we were off, each picking our favorite monster to go wreck one city after another.
💾 And this game, just like many others, permanently etched certain memories into my mind. The best example I can give is the representation of the skyscrapers in the background. It gave me my very first visions of massive American cities. I literally grew up with pixel art, being born in 1984. And to me, the pixel style holds an inherent beauty because it leaves so much room for the imagination. Take a pixelated drawing and try to upscale it to 4K, and everyone will come up with their own unique interpretation. All those games back then, when you were just a kid, allowed you to imagine whatever you wanted. The background skyscrapers were as numerous as we imagined, reaching whatever height we wanted, glowing in the colors we dreamed up. So many games from that era showed us distant landscapes, sprawling cities, and towering buildings sketched out in just a few pixels to save on color palette (and RAM), and I find that absolutely incredible. It pushed us to envision so much more than what was actually on the screen. We never truly knew what was back there, we just constantly imagined a bustling life going on, feeling like the game universe stretched far beyond the foreground.
So we definitely grinded Rampage together as a duo, and honestly, we laughed our heads off. Between the buildings collapsing, the army tanks we punched right back to their base, and the sheer joy of slapping each other around, especially on the edges of rooftops to send the other one falling 40 stories down or even one-shotting them, it was completely epic.
💬 Honestly, put yourself in our shoes, we are 2 years apart, we were completely destroying New York while smacking each other in the face, or teaming up to beat down King Kong because we always mained Lizzie and Wolf. What more could you possibly ask for when you are not even 10 years old... And this is just one of the many, many games we experienced together.
Keep in mind, at that age, if you play a game in English, you barely understand a thing. You almost never had the instruction manual either. And practically nothing was ever explained in Amstrad games. So we had absolutely no choice, we had to try everything, fail, and try again to figure it out. Even after all that trial and error, we still had massive question marks floating over our heads while playing the Amstrad. For example, in Rampage, why is it that when you step in that weird puddle on the ground, you turn into some bizarre floating bubble until you pop out of it ? And why does it drain our health ? Why, once every single building had fallen, could we just stay on the ground forever, punching a police car back and forth like a tennis ball ?
We never found out, we just did it over and over again. There was also something truly grandiose about watching those helicopters, the police, and the military desperately trying to save humanity, we really felt like we were causing a global cataclysm. We pushed forward map after map, with more and more buildings crowding the screen, and the timer to knock them all down felt shorter and shorter.
We beat Rampage, and we beat it together. These are incredible moments that bonded us for life. 30 years later, we still bring it up sometimes and... it always cracks us up. That poor George... the absolute beating we gave him, I am sure he remembers it too.
💬 It was really something... that Rampage. So basic, so simple, completely memorable.
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