Ramp for Ages

This is the first time that I’ll write about games that were released on the same year (1986) ant the reason is pretty simple: too many good games appeared on that year, so I can’t just pick one and skip the rest! One of these instant classic arcade games is no other than the mythic “Rampage”, which featured three giant monsters terrorizing every street and city which they come upon.

The game’s main characters -named George, Lizzie and Ralph- were just ordinary people until they were mutated into humongous monsters as the result of a secret experiment (which obviously went awfully wrong). George turned into a giant ape after swallowing mega-vitamins, Lizzie transformed into a giant lizard once he bathed in a radioactive lake, and Ralph ended up as a giant wolf when he ate sausage scam.

You can go round trashing everything on sight for a total of 768 days of destruction and some. But the most fun you’ll get out of this game is when two other friends join you on your path of devastation. That’s right, three people can play and create havoc simultaneously, each player controlling a different monster.

Each round is completed when a particular city is completely reduced to rubble, eating people and destroying helicopters, tanks, taxis, police cars, boats, and trolleys along the way. Monsters can jump and climb buildings; smashing at the edges for long enough will make them collapse. Buildings also take damage when jumped on by a monster. The police and military are after monsters, so they’ll receive damage from enemy bullets, grenades, shells and so forth, and from falls. Damage is recovered by eating appropriate food such as fruit, plants, roast chicken, or soldiers. If a monster takes too much damage, it shrinks back into its human form.

If you want to play Rampage online follow the link & check out the developer's page, or you can play it in an arcade machine emulator like MAME (Multiple Arcade Macine Emulator) . Then download the Rampage rom (click on Dowload This Rom and enter the numbers) and unzip it into the Roms folder inside the MAME directory (wherever you installed it).

Monstrous Facts

-The game has originally three characters: George (King Kong), Lizzie (Godzilla) and Ralph (Wolfman). But the Atari Lynx version featured a fourth character named Lester, a giant Ratman, who could join in the fun since the Lynx had 4-player support.