Rampage review: the game where you were the monster

A giant gorilla climbs the side of an office building and punches out a window. A lizard is working on the building next door. A wolf is snacking on a soldier. None of them are the villains. They are you and your two friends.

Why is wrecking a city this satisfying?

Up to three players control George, Lizzie and Ralph, humans turned into giant monsters, and the job is simple: raze the buildings to reach the next city, eating people and knocking down helicopters, tanks and police cars along the way. You climb, you punch, the building crumbles, and you ride it down.

Designer Brian Colin wanted a game with no wrong way to play, and you can feel that in the rules. There is no maze to learn and no single correct route. Health comes back by eating food, which includes the soldiers shooting at you. The skyscrapers themselves came from a hardware limit: the developers could only move rectangular shapes in the background, so the game became about tearing rectangles down. That is a limitation turned into a joke, and the joke is the game.

Most games ask you to save the city. This one asked who wanted to be the gorilla.

The little cruelties

The fun lives in small details. A photographer can blind you with his flash and knock you off a building, so you learn to eat him first. Take too much damage and your monster turns back into a small human who has to walk off the screen, and in that state you can be eaten by another monster. Everyone who played with friends remembers the first time that happened, and whether they forgave the person who did it.

Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman built all of that on hardware that could barely keep up, and it still reads clearly from across a room.

What it meant back then

Rampage was about American cities, which made it different from almost everything else on the floor. The game is set over 128 days in cities across North America, and it starts in Peoria, Illinois. Colin even sent press releases to local media in the towns the monsters visited, dressed up as a memo warning that their town was slated for destruction. For a kid at the mall arcade or the roller rink, seeing a real American city get knocked down by a gorilla you controlled was worth every quarter.

Playing it today

It is repetitive in the way arcade games were allowed to be, and a single player misses the point. Get two friends, pick your monsters, and see how long the alliance lasts. It still ends the same way it did then, with somebody eating somebody.