Primal Rage review: clay gods with a real mean streak

A tyrannosaur and a giant ape square off on a cliff while tiny people worship them from the ground. The monsters move with that slightly jerky, handmade motion of an old creature movie, and the tribespeople scatter when a tail swings their way. Nothing else in the fighting game row looked like this.

Monsters made by hand

The game's graphics were produced via claymation and stop motion animation. Model maker Dan Platt crafted clay figures of the fighters, and each one was filmed frame by frame. That gives every beast a physical weight. You can almost see the thumbprints. It is the reason people still remember the game: it looked like something built on a tabletop, not drawn on a computer.

You pick one of seven prehistoric beasts, gods of a ruined future Earth called Urth, each with its own style. Some are big and slow. The raptor is fast and nasty. The cobra goddess plays tricks. The fights are standard for the era: drain the other health bar before yours runs out.

It looked like a stop motion monster movie that someone had wired to a joystick.

Controls that go backward

Here is the part that surprised players. Most fighting games of the time asked you to move the joystick and then press a button. Primal Rage asked you to hold down buttons first, then do the joystick motion. Its four-button controls were meant to be less intimidating than the six buttons on the big fighting games, and the unusual inputs meant a newcomer mashing buttons would sometimes pull off a special move by accident.

That made it friendly and a little shallow. A skilled player and a lucky beginner could look surprisingly similar for a round. For an arcade crowd, that was not a flaw. It meant anyone could step up.

A dark sense of humor

The tiny worshipers are the best joke in the game. During a fight you can devour them to regain health, and eating your opponent's followers earns a bonus while eating your own costs you. The finishing moves lean the same way. One of Vertigo's turns her opponent into a cow that runs off. And if two human players know the trick, they can start hidden games of volleyball and bowling using the worshipers as the ball.

What it meant back then

In American arcades of the mid nineties the fighting game row was the busiest part of the room, and Primal Rage stood out in it like a museum diorama. It pulled in kids who loved dinosaurs, older players tired of the same martial artists, and anyone who had grown up on monster movies on Saturday television. It was the cabinet at the mall that people photographed in their memory, even if they only played it a few times.

Playing it now

As a fighting game it is simple, and the timing feels loose next to the classics of its era. As a piece of handmade animation with a wicked sense of humor, it is a treasure. Play a few rounds, eat a few worshipers, and let the clay monsters remind you how much personality a game can carry.