When I came across that loud, noisy Rampage arcade machine on a random day in the mid-80s, I immediately stopped in my tracks and became consumed by the sheer spectacle of what it was displaying. In that moment, I was in awe of what I was seeing and hearing.
This game, whatever it was, had grabbed my attention in a big way!
As I stood there, I examined the cabinet's artwork with an excited energy, and as soon as the imagery's context became clear to me, I thought to myself, "Now here's a game that's right up my alley!"
Back then, that was usually the way in which you were introduced to a new arcade favorite. There was no buildup to its arrival, no pre-release hype, and no grand unveiling. You never knew that it was coming. You just turned a corner one day and saw it standing there in place of the Arknoid or OutRun machine that had been occupying that space for years. And your first impression of it was formed by what it showed you in that moment--by the captivating power of its striking cabinet art, spectacular graphics, and resounding music and sound effects.
And what you'd experience in that moment would forever shape your mental image of the game.
My interest in the latter leaned mostly in the direction of Gothic-style monster movies and particularly the type that featured Count Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and the like, but still I was also a huge fan of science-fiction films in which behemoths like King and Godzilla tore through cities and battled equally colossal foes. King Kong and Godzilla, in particular, were monster-movie royalty to me, and quite often, I'd include them in my monster-battle drawings, in which they'd match up against each other or pair together to battle titanic terrors like Rodan, Mothra, and the Kraken from Clash of the Titans.
What can I say? I simply loved monsters and monster battles!
Driven by that desire, I rushed over to the Rampage machine and dropped a quarter into its coin slot.
And instantly I became a fan of Rampage. I loved everything about it: its breathtaking city setting; its large, impressively rendered character sprites; its explosive, incredibly reverberant sound effects; and its frenzied action, whose powerful visceral energy provided the game a bestial personality and thus made it worthy of the movies that inspired it.
Rampage was unlike any game I'd ever played before. I couldn't think of any other game that allowed you to take control of a giant monster--the type that would normally appear as an all-conquering end boss--and furiously and recklessly destroy buildings, snack on citizens and army folk alike, and punch out any fellow behemoth that got in your way. Rampage was the first to do it. It was the only game that was brave enough to turn the classic video-game formula on its head and put you in control of the destructive villains.
It gave you permission to buck restraint and show your wild side--to freely engage in extreme violence and destroy everything around you. It encouraged you to ignore the normal rules of video games and have fun doing whatever the hell you wanted to do. And that's what made it such an awesome game!
Now, I had a ton of fun experimenting with Rampage's basic tactics (climbing buildings and tearing them down piece by piece, jump-grabbing and eating the people who were hanging out of windows, and pummeling the incoming trains, boats and tanks), certainly, but they weren't what I liked most about the game. My favorite aspect, rather, was the sheer amount of activity that was occurring at a single time. There was insane amount of stuff going on!
I mean, you were in a literal war zone! Buildings were collapsing and blowing up all around you! Army helicopters were flying in from all angles and relentlessly pursing their targets! Storms of bullets and grenades were filling the screen! Panicked civilians were constantly jumping out of windows and fleeing in terror! General devastation was transpiring on every portion of the screen!
And being enveloped in such a scene was equal parts exciting and concerning. The game's chaotic nature invited joyously reckless play and thus filled me with feelings of exhilaration, yeah, but at the same time, it also put you me in a position in which I was highly vulnerable and struggling to conserve health ("So this is what it's like to be a hapless boss character," I'd think whenever I was running out of health and being attacked from every direction). It evoked intense feelings.
And Rampage's extreme degree of activity and powerful ability to evoke intense feelings were what made it so appealing to me. They're what made it a next-level arcade game.
In my first session with Rampage, I had great fun discovering all of the ways in which you could interact with the stage environments. I was amazed by the number of ways in which you could pound on and destroy buildings. I was fascinated to learn, for instance, that you could not only punch the building you were currently climbing but also (a) throw back-punches and damage parts of the adjacent building and (b) punch upward and damage the building that was positioned behind the one you were scaling. I'd never played a game that allowed for that type of interaction. It seemed so advanced.
At the time, I considered the ability to strike background objects, in particular, to be the product of programming sorcery. The way I understood it, a background existed on a wholly separate plane and wasn't interactable; it was scenery, and all you could do was walk in front of it and observe it. But in Rampage, that wasn't the case; here, in this game, you could actually interact with certain background objects and therein pound on them and level them! That was wild to me.
And because you could interact with objects across all axes, you could potentially take out three separate buildings from a single location! That ability was mind-blowing!
"If you could get two or three players together and attack in that manner," I thought, "I bet you could level a city in seconds!"
Any session with Rampage was an intense, exciting game of anarchy and survival, and the experience was always thrilling and fun.
At the time, no other arcade game was as engaging.
And if you could get some friends or strangers to join you, you were likely to engage in the most frenzied, chaotic action imaginable and consequently have the most fun you could possibly experience in an arcade. (And you could gain maximum enjoyment by tauntingly munching down your de-mutated rivals as they were trying to escape!)
Rampage, like all others in its class, had a role: It was a tasty appetizer. It was the small treat that you enjoyed before you turned your attention to the main dish--to more-substantive games like Rolling Thunder, Double Dragon, Ninja Gaiden and WWF Superstars. Also, it was a great option when (a) you only had a few quarters left and you wanted to play a game that could offer four-five minutes of solid action or (b) you had already played through all of your favorites and were looking for some quick, satisfying action that could serve as a nice little capper to your arcade-going experience.
And it played its role well.
Sadly, I have no specific memories of my subsequent sessions with Rampage. All I remember is that I gave equal time to George and Lizzie--because they were obvious analogs for King Kong and Godzilla, both of whom I loved--and mostly avoided Ralph, who didn't interest me. He was, as best as I could tell, a giant werewolf, and his inclusion was strange to me because I couldn't recall ever seeing a giant werewolf in a monster movie. So he was just a simple werewolf, and for that reason, he had no allure to him. And thus I'd ignore him.
Hell--it was common that I'd forget that Ralph was even in the game!
If I'm being completely honest, though, I have to say that my memory lapses were caused mostly by some other product.
You see: I had a really bad habit. I had a tendency to go out and buy NES conversions of my favorite arcade games even when I was rightfully suspicious of their quality or aware of the fact that they didn't come close to matching up to the original works technologically.
I just couldn't help myself.
So in 1989, I went out and bought myself a copy of NES Rampage, and when I popped it into the console, I discovered, predictably, that my suspicions were correct: Rampage simply didn't work as well on 8-bit hardware. The necessary compromises naturally rendered it a lesser product. It didn't look or sound as good as the original, and it didn't play quite as well. Also, it was missing content! Most notably, Ralph had been completely cut from the game (and this helps to explain my comment from before: because, ultimately, I spent more time playing the NES version, which lacked his presence, I wound up forgetting that he existed!)
Also, the fact of the matter was that Rampage was an arcade game at heart. It had different values. It was meant to played in busy, lively social settings and enjoyed in short bursts. Thus it didn't make for a particularly exciting home-console game (especially when it had been stripped down).
I mean, my friends and I still considered it to be a competent conversion, and we liked playing it, but we just couldn't deny that its action, much like the arcade original's, was too repetitive to be fun for more than five-ten minutes.
In our lengthiest sessions, we'd get to somewhere around day 40, but by then, we'd be so bored and disengaged that not even our "hilarious" banter could provide us the will to play onward.
That's why we'd play Rampage only occasionally.
There were certainly times when we'd drag out the experience and continue playing Rampage long after it had worn out its welcome, but we'd only do that because we were interested in finding out what happened when the entire U.S. map had been wiped out and reduced to a black void.
Though, by the time we'd get to Texas, we would, invariably, have arrived a point in which the game's entertainment value had long since been exhausted and we were so mentally checked out that we didn't feel as though making further progress was worth the effort. Right around then, we'd just quit and move on to another game.
But I have to say that we did beat Rampage on one occasion. It happened on a day when my friend Mike and I randomly decided, mostly out of boredom, to play through the game's entire campaign--all 128 stages--and do so with the hope that our obliteration of California, the final target, would earn us a reward that was amazing enough to justify the effort.
And when we completed our mission, we learned, to our great disappointment, that there was absolutely nothing waiting for us at the end. There was no cut-scene, no epilogue, no imagery, or even a token "Thank you for playing!" All we got, rather, was a bland, muted credits sequence. And then, insultingly, the game continued on.
And Mike and I were pretty pissed about what we were seeing. We'd spent over two hours trudging our way through this game, and our reward for doing so was absolutely nothing.
What a gyp.
As far as I can recall, we never returned to NES Rampage in following. We stuck mainly to the arcade original. And that made sense because arcades were where Rampage truly belonged. They were where Rampage's style of action was best enjoyed.
Still, though, there were certain things about our Rampage experiences that remained consistent no matter which version we were playing. In each session, we would assuredly have some fun, share a lot of laughs, and find great amusement in messing with each other.
And also, we'd always make sure to do what was paramount: hold to our oath to celebrate the destruction of any city with the joyous, triumphant Head-Nod of Happiness.
Take that, California!
No comments:
Post a Comment