Rampage
Too Funny Game #5
Type of Game
Tutorials on building repairs, furniture installation and residents, but everything backwards, basically.
Release date on our machines
1987 on Atari ST, but it was so long ago that no one has a more accurate date.
Developer
Bally Midway Mfg Co., a large manufacturer of pinball machines and later arcade games, and then nothing.
Publisher
Activision, Inc., a big company, plain and simple
Rampage: not available anywhere! You shouldn't have destroyed all the servers installed in the buildings.
I'm cheating a little with this game. I didn't know it in the twentieth century, but rather in 2005-2006. During that period, which lasted over a year, neither my best friend Randall Geyser nor I had girlfriends. We suffered quite a bit, no doubt about it. That was all we talked about: finding a girl. We theorised about what we called ‘the aura of the settled guy’, who attracted girls without having to do anything because he was already in a relationship, while singles like us scared them away despite all our efforts. We saw it as inevitable, when in fact it was most likely due to our behaviour, which combined emotional despair and a lack of self-confidence. Oh yes, and injunctions urging us to behave like dominant, conquering alpha males. We happily wallowed in these injunctions; we hadn't yet understood that we had to move away from them to become people worth spending time with. What did we do to remedy our misfortunes? Did we socialise by going out more and doing fulfilling activities? No way! We geeked out like brutes, of course!
Entertainment without a plan
And so, since we didn't really care that much, stopping playing it forever didn't traumatise us either. But still, I feel like I missed out on something when I think back on it every six and a half months. Unused gameplay features, levels we skimmed over or didn't try at all... I hope to discover lots of new features that will make me burst with nostalgia.
Laughing in blocks... of buildings
The intro scene begins, as if I were seeing it for the first time. Well, the title screen appears. Against the backdrop of a stunning night-time city skyline, depending on our tolerance for horror, we are presented with a giant lizard that gets hit in the stomach by a shell, and an equally huge wolf, fist raised and lips curled, probably yelling at the person who launched the missile in question. In the middle, the word Rampage is written in huge yellow and red letters, with a hairy arm piercing through the P. Between the stubby fingers of this arm stands a woman with her fists on her hips, looking moderately annoyed by her situation, wearing a rather skimpy red dress, and therefore perfectly suited to this kind of activity. Loooool, the chick who is captured like in King Kong, not even screaming in terror! It's so not believable! Apart from that detail, um... ALRIGHT IT'S AWESOME!
Randall didn't lie to me, this image alone is pretty heavy stuff, especially for a six or seven-year-old kid who grew up on Sly and Governator's big pecs. We quickly learn that the reptile is called Lizzy, the canine is called Ralph, and the arm belongs to a big primate with the sweet name of George. The woman in the dress is called Denise, but that's my own invention. We'll skip over the lore, which explains why these three aberrations exist: human beings who mutated due to scientific experiments gone wrong. A different experiment for each one, but with seemingly similar timing, because why not? We love coincidences like that. As in IK+, you can play with one, two or three players. And unlike IK+, you have to blow up buildings to win.
You climb on top of them and hit them in lots of places to knock them down, then move on to the next level, and so on, perpetuating the chain of gameplay that is, admittedly, a tad repetitive. Many critics emphasise this point. Well, we didn't have time to get bored, we died before that. Of course, the other people, the ones who haven't mutated, defend themselves a little. At least the ones who work in the army. Each stage sends us more and more helicopters, soldiers equipped with guns, sticks of dynamite or bombs, tanks... Besides, I know that our demolition operation is taking place in the United States, but still ! There are a lot of armed individuals in these buildings! And they're shooting at us without mercy! It's not easy to dodge everything that's coming at us, with our ten-metre-high carcass to lug around.
We always ended up getting buried under bullets and rockets. To be honest, I found it really hard pretty quickly. To think that there were 128 stages, each representing an American city (the names of which vary depending on the port, with some even being exported to Canada), and that you have to play through each one six times to actually finish Rampage! At least that's how it was on Arcade. Apparently, the developers claimed that no one had ever seen the end of it. Well, yes, it's easy to design a game that's impossible to finish when you use this kind of loop. A Super Ghouls'n Ghosts that's three times longer and has to be replayed fifteen times? No one finishes that either. Nor do they finish R-Type Delta. But in those two, you have to accomplish the feat of completing them even once. At least in Rampage, you can fight back and blow up just about anything with a single punch.
Except for buildings, which take a little longer, obviously. But destroying a helicopter that halved your health bar is still pretty satisfying. Crushing two tanks, a tram and five cars without getting hit once is even better. And then we eat too, all the time; mostly people calling for help from their shabby flats, at least those who don't have their super golden bullet card from the NRA. They give us a little health when we bite them, ‘Thank you for your service’. By the way, the woman in red on the home screen is one of the potential victims. In the arcade version, I saw her beat up fat George and run away while she was trapped in his hand, ready to be devoured; so I had misjudged her, with her make-up and cleavage. She was actually just angry, and very capable of defending herself. Getting a lesson in feminism from a 1986 game in which big monsters tear down buildings for fun hurts my deconstruction.
That said, I don't think her cousin in the Atari ST version was doing so well, which is where my prejudices come from. Except that one of the monsters you play was a woman before being exploited by crooked lab technicians! So, is Rampage an ally of the cause or what? I'll leave the answer to others. But let's get back to the topic at hand. Who else can we snack on? The mutants themselves! When their health bar drops to zero, they revert to human form and try to slip quietly off the screen. They hold their crotches, since they're naked, lmaooooo. All the more reason to eat them, right? They should have just worn underpants from the same brand as the clothes found in Dragon Ball. Do people end up naked after taking three Final Flashes in Dragon Ball Super Butoden 2? Never! Come on, get in line, you so-called woke video game! I didn't mention it, but absolutely everything I just said made us laugh hysterically.
What else did we laugh about? All the items we found by breaking the windows of skyscrapers: televisions, for example, which you weren't supposed to bite into, or you'd get a nasty shock. Bathtubs, I think, which immobilised you for a few seconds while you managed to chew them (you'd have to be stupid to confuse a bathtub with a sugar-coated almond). Finally, other things that earned you points. Just points, or life too, I can't remember. But there were fewer of them than in the arcade version, I'm almost certain. Finally, you could trip over pools filled with water. As if there were outdoor swimming pools that took up the entire width of an avenue, right? So there you have it, we've reached the point where pretty much everyone agrees. It quickly becomes repetitive. So what did we do to revive interest in the game? Well, we beat each other up. Yeah, like in Streets of Rage or Golden Axe; not to mention the even more hilarious variation of knocking down the building the other person was standing on. We lost even faster, but the ratio of speed of defeat to intensity of laughter swung heavily in our favour.
Better than the arcade !
Rampage has achieved the remarkable achievement of offering music on Atari ST, even though the arcade version does not! We owe this miracle to David Whittaker, a big thank you to this composer who was very active in the 1980s and early 1990s on the most popular computers of the time. He is responsible for the soundtracks of Barbarian, Ghosts and Goblins on Amstrad CPC, SimCity on Atari ST, the versions of Tetris on old computers, as well as the sound ports of Bubble Bobble and Golden Axe. So, he only released one composition for Rampage, let's not get too excited. Not the best choice to break up the monotony of the gameplay, at first glance. Still, this music rocks pretty hard. The long siren that rises in the high notes at the beginning, then the dramatic melody that kicks in, accompanied by horrible shrill trills that I've learned to love, nostalgia helping (nostalgia doing all the work would be more accurate). Yeah... as it loops endlessly, with no break other than the screen indicating the next city to destroy, I wonder if we didn't stop playing because of this piece, even before we used up all our lives. It must have driven us crazy, especially in the middle of a sugar rush, after eating a snack consisting solely of eighteen chocolate Prince biscuits. No wonder our toys always ended up with torn-off limbs.
Solid as the Rock
I think if I played Rampage again today, I wouldn't last more than five minutes. Just like back then, except that I wouldn't go and torture my G.I. Joes afterwards (for the sole reason that I don't have any left). It's one of those games that I'd rather leave as a dusty floppy disk in the back of my mind than risk ruining it forever by playing it again. Thanks to my fond memories, I chose to watch the 2018 film on a plane journey, and nothing else. Throughout, I searched for references to the video game with a bewildered grin, almost indifferent to the mediocrity of the scenes unfolding before my eyes.
Luckily, Dwyane Johnson makes the thing somewhat watchable. Sorry, mate, but your character, as beefy as he is, wouldn't have lasted ten seconds on Atari. We would have beaten you up like the others, Randall and me. Denise too, she would have kicked your arse. Nevertheless, the franchise has spawned no less than seven games in total, the last one released in the same year as The Rock's blockbuster, as part of the promotion. I dare to hope that the mechanics have evolved a little since 1986, otherwise it would lead to a lot of running around in circles. I won't be looking into it, both because I don't want to waste my time, and because I might end up wanting to try one or two (and waste even more time). But I salute the dedication of those who have tested all the games. I'll stop there, before I change my mind and decide they're all a bunch of weirdos.
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