Game of the Week: Rampage for arcade

By 1986, most video game fanatics thought they had seen it all. You had your maze games, your shooting games, your sports games, and everything in between.

Then the company Bally Midway put out a game about monsters tearing apart cities. The title? Rampage.

In Rampage, the player controlled one of three monsters, either a giant lizard, a giant ape or a giant wolfman. Your goals were simple. You roamed around a town and climbed buildings to tear those buildings apart. Of course those pesky little humans were there to try and stop you, which they would attempt by throwing dynamite at you or shooting you with their tiny little guns or sometimes a big tank. There were a few other dangers, as well, such as you could accidentally electrocute yourself if you grabbed a power line within one of the buildings, and sometimes if you ate something it might not be good for you.

Oh, yeah, speaking of eating ... you got to eat people, too. While climbing a tall building, you could bash a hole in a wall and reach in and pull out some poor bastard to munch away on.

All for only 25 cents.

Yes, long before the likes of today's violent video games in which you could work out your own personal frustrations (I'm looking at you, Grand Theft Auto), there was Rampage.

And coming out relatively late during the early days of video games, Rampage had solid graphics for the time, as well as good sound and decent gameplay.

My only complaint was that I felt the games didn't last long enough. See, once your giant monster took too much damage, the monster would revert into a small, helpless human and then would slink away off the screen. Still, for 25 cents, what can you expect?

Rampage has proven to be a popular franchise ever since its release. Not only has it been made available on nearly every home video game system and computer system and handheld gaming system known to mankind, but there have been several sequel games, some for the arcades and others for computers and home gaming systems. A couple of the more popular sequels have been Rampage World Tour and Rampage Through Time.