Throwback Thursday: Rampage Edition

Ryan Mottola ’14 / Emertainment Monthly Staff

You can’t be a dinosaur, they said. You can’t eat your friends, they said. They’ve obviously never played Midway’s Rampage.
Originally released as an arcade game in 1986, Rampage became a cult classic among rebellious teens and sci-fi fans alike. Later editions were titled Rampage: World Tour, Rampage: Universal Tour, and Rampage: Total Destruction. Each version contained its own unique monsters and levels, but the best version was World Tour for the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation.

In Rampage: World Tour, Scumlabs has created three abominations known as George the gorilla, Ralph the Werewolf, and Lizzie the lizard. The trio is enormous in size, eats everyone and everything in sight, and just wants to smash society to pieces. Your job as the player is to travel the world (and eventually the moon) to do what you do best: destroy. Who wouldn’t love to smash buildings, throw tanks, and swat at choppers? After you level each city, you’re told where exactly it is you’ve destroyed, from Atlanta to Zurich.

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Although the plot is lacking, the juvenile humor in every aspect of the game keeps you and up to two of your friends wildly entertained.  The controls, like all of the other Rampages, are clunky, but combined with the mechanics of the game they leave the creativity of destroying skyscrapers completely up to the player. The production quality is exactly what you would expect from the late nineties, but the comedy combined with the party-style game play makes Rampage 100% re-playable.
Despite its lack of groundbreaking changes in the gaming industry, Rampage is still one of the most memorable games around; even Sony agrees, as they re-releasing the game on the PlayStation Network in 2007.