THE RAMPAGE GAMES: COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE

In 1986, Bally Midway put a cabinet in arcades that let you play as a giant gorilla, a giant lizard, or a giant werewolf, and your entire job was to punch buildings until they fell over. That's it. That's the whole pitch. No save the princess, no stop the invasion, no collect the macguffin. Just climb the skyscraper and smash it.

I have spent a concerning amount of my life thinking about why this worked. Why a game with three buttons and one idea ran for twenty years, spawned six mainline entries, got a Dwayne Johnson movie in 2018, and then just... stopped. Nothing since 2006. An entire generation of gamers has grown up without a new Rampage game, and nobody at Warner Bros. Games seems to care.

So I'm going to do the thing. I'm going to go through every Rampage game, say what it did, whether it was any good, and at the end we'll talk about the weird dead silence around the franchise. Buckle up, George.

Rampage (1986)

The original. Three monsters, each a parody of a classic movie creature. George is the King Kong stand-in, a giant ape. Lizzie is Godzilla with the serial numbers filed off. Ralph is a werewolf, which makes no sense given the scale but also makes perfect sense given the vibe.

You pick one and then you destroy cities across the United States. The game runs 128 days across various American locales, starting in Peoria and ending in Plano. Every day is one city. Every city is a screen of buildings. You punch the buildings until they collapse. You eat the people who run out. You avoid the tanks, helicopters, and electrified power lines that are trying to kill you. Fall off a building and you drop one floor of health. Get shot too many times and you revert to your tiny, naked human form and run off screen in shame.

What made the original work wasn't depth. It was attitude. The little touches of humor, the way George would grab a woman out of a bathtub and eat her while she screamed, the way Ralph would sit on a toilet between buildings. It was mean. It was dumb. It was extremely 1986.

The two player and three player cabinets let you team up, which is where the game really sang. Cooperative destruction with friends, punching each other by accident, fighting over the last tank, eating helicopter pilots. Rampage at its best was a party game before that was a genre.

Rampage: World Tour (1997)

Eleven years passed. Midway finally made a proper sequel. World Tour takes the original's formula and expands it to the entire planet. You tour the world smashing cities, and the reason why is actually explained this time. Scumlabs, a shady biotech corporation, is creating mutants and pollution. Your three monsters (George, Lizzie, and Ralph, all back) are on a revenge tour to destroy every Scumlabs branch on Earth.

This is my favorite Rampage game and it's not close. World Tour is the sweet spot of the franchise. Still 2D, still sprite based, but everything is bigger, louder, and more cartoonish. There are vehicles you can pick up and throw. There are secret items hidden in buildings. There are power ups. There are food jokes, so many food jokes, about eating things you shouldn't eat. Eating a toilet makes you sick. Eating a grenade makes you explode. Eating a poison barrel kills you.

The art direction is where World Tour really earns it. The Midway house style of the late 90s, with chunky pixel sprites and exaggerated animations, fits the monster smashing premise perfectly. Every building destruction feels satisfying. Every monster has personality. The arcade cabinet was a staple of bowling alleys and pizza places for years, and the home ports to PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Saturn, and Game Boy Color kept the game alive well into the next console generation.

If you've only played one Rampage, you probably played this one. And if you haven't played it, it's the one to track down.

Rampage 2: Universal Tour (1999)

Things get weird here. Universal Tour replaces George, Lizzie, and Ralph with three new monsters named Curtis, Ruby, and Boris. The original three are now in captivity, and your job as the new monsters is to rescue them by destroying cities.

Fine premise. Execution is uneven. Universal Tour came out on Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, which means it's a 3D era game built for the twilight of 2D arcade design. The result is a game that looks like an N64 game (not always flattering) and plays like an arcade game that should have stayed 2D. The perspective is awkward. The controls feel looser. The building destruction doesn't have the same crunch.

There are moments where it works. The new monster designs are fun. Curtis is a giant rat, Ruby is a lobster thing, Boris is some sort of rhino. The levels have more variety than World Tour, with vehicles you can hijack and new power ups. But the core feel is off. The game is too fast, too slippery, and the jokes don't land as hard.

It's not a bad game. It's just not a good Rampage game, if that makes sense. Universal Tour is the point where you can feel the franchise losing its identity, trying to figure out what a 3D Rampage should be and not quite landing it.

Rampage Through Time (2000)

This one is ambitious in a weird way. Through Time takes the three original monsters (George, Lizzie, and Ralph are back, the new guys are retired) and sends them across four historical eras. Prehistoric, Ancient Rome, the Wild West, and the future. Each era has its own cities to destroy and its own enemies to avoid.

On paper, great idea. Monster rampage through time is a Rampage concept that could have been the start of something new for the franchise. In practice, Through Time is a PlayStation game that came out in 2000 and looks and plays like a late PS1 title, which by 2000 was rough. The PS2 was out. Dreamcast had Sonic Adventure. Through Time felt like a budget release even when it was new.

The time period gimmick also doesn't really change gameplay. You're still destroying buildings. The buildings look different. The soldiers look different. The core loop is identical. It's a reskin with a framing device, and you can feel the effort ran out before the ambition did.

I still have a soft spot for Through Time because the concept is so Rampage. Smashing Roman aqueducts as George is a funny mental image. But the game itself is the weakest of the mainline entries.

Rampage Puzzle Attack (2001)

And now for something completely different. Puzzle Attack is a Game Boy Advance puzzle game in the Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon family. You match colored blocks on a grid. Clear enough blocks and your monster punches the opponent's city. It's a competitive puzzle game with a Rampage skin.

Honestly? It's pretty good. The puzzle mechanics are solid, the monster roster is deep (eight monsters including the classics and some returning Universal Tour characters), and the presentation is cute. For a handheld game in 2001, it's exactly what it needed to be: a pick up and play distraction with enough Rampage flavor to justify the license.

It's not the Rampage experience most people wanted. Nobody was asking for a Rampage puzzle game. But as a side entry in the franchise, it's a pleasant surprise and probably the most underrated entry in the series.

Rampage: Total Destruction (2006)

The last one. Total Destruction came out on PS2, GameCube, and Wii in 2006, and it is the end of the franchise as a going concern. There has not been a new Rampage game since. Twenty years of silence and counting.

Total Destruction tried to do the sequel thing right. Thirty playable monsters (most unlockable, eight to start), cities across the globe, boss fights, mini games, and the return of the classic three as centerpieces. On paper, it's the biggest Rampage ever made. In practice, it's a competent but soulless game that doesn't quite capture what the older entries had.

Part of the problem is that Total Destruction is a PS2 era game competing with PS2 era expectations. By 2006, a game where you just destroy buildings felt small. Open world games existed. GTA: San Andreas had been out for two years. The pure arcade loop of Rampage looked dated next to the sandbox destruction of Crackdown or the physics-based chaos of Mercenaries. Total Destruction is stuck between arcade simplicity and modern scope and doesn't fully commit to either.

I wrote a longer piece on Total Destruction specifically if you want the deep read, but the short version is this: it's not a bad game, it just isn't a great one, and it was the send off the franchise didn't deserve. Midway went bankrupt in 2009. The Rampage IP got absorbed into Warner Bros. Games in the fire sale. And since then, nothing.

The 2018 movie

Dwayne Johnson starred in a Rampage movie in 2018. It made $428 million at the global box office on a budget of around $120 million, which is a hit by most measurements. Critical reception was mixed but positive for what it was. Audiences had a good time. The CGI monsters looked great. Dwayne Johnson did Dwayne Johnson things.

And the movie exists in a strange place relative to the games. It takes the basic premise (giant monsters destroying cities) and the three classic monsters (George is now an albino gorilla, Ralph is a giant wolf with porcupine quills, Lizzie is a giant crocodile with a spiked tail), but it otherwise invents its own story. There's a government conspiracy, a CRISPR mutation pathogen, and a climactic battle in downtown Chicago. It's a Rampage movie the way Battleship was a Battleship movie. The connection is surface level.

What's strange is that the movie's success did nothing for the games. In any sane world, a $428 million movie about a beloved game IP would kick off a game revival. Tie in release, remastered collection, new entry on current platforms. It didn't happen. Warner Bros. Games, which owned the IP and could have had a game ready to ship alongside the film, simply did not ship one. The movie came and went. The games stayed dead.

I've thought about why a lot. The cynical answer is that Warner Bros. Games in 2018 was focused on live service and premium blockbusters, and Rampage doesn't fit either mold. The franchise is an arcade game at heart. It's short sessions, two to four players, simple controls, visual chaos. That doesn't translate neatly to 2018 business models.

Why the simple premise lasted 20 years

The original Rampage worked because it was a pure expression of an impulse most game designers spend careers trying to suppress. The impulse to break things. Games are full of rules. Rules about what you can pick up, what you can destroy, where you can go. Rampage was a game where the rules said yes. Yes you can climb that building. Yes you can punch it down. Yes you can eat that guy. Yes you can throw that car.

That yes engine is what kept the franchise alive through twenty years of hardware generations. World Tour, Universal Tour, Through Time, and Total Destruction all tried to modernize the formula, but the core appeal never changed. You are big, the city is small, and you get to wreck it. Every era of gaming rediscovers this appeal. It's why kaiju games keep getting made. It's why Godzilla's best games are the ones that let you smash Tokyo. It's why the destruction demo is still the best five minutes of any open world game.

Rampage got there first, and Rampage did it with cartoon monsters and a bathtub gag.

Why there's been nothing since 2006

The franchise is legally alive. Warner Bros. Games has the IP. The movie proved the brand has recognition. The games sold well enough across their run to justify more entries. There's no principled reason a new Rampage shouldn't exist.

The answer, as best I can figure, is that AAA publishers don't know how to scope a modern Rampage. A full open world destruction game in the Crackdown or Just Cause tradition is expensive to build and hard to monetize. A back to basics arcade revival wouldn't hit the revenue numbers a major publisher needs from a licensed IP. And the middle ground, a $40 arcade feeling game with modern polish, is a publisher model that has mostly evaporated in the last decade.

Smaller studios have picked up the slack with unofficial spiritual successors. Kaiju games, destruction sandboxes, giant monster roguelikes. There are dozens of indie projects scratching the same itch. We covered a bunch of them in our piece on games like Rampage if you want recommendations. But the official franchise sits on a Warner Bros. shelf collecting dust.

What a new Rampage should look like

Four player coop. Split screen or online. Big maps, procedurally generated from a set of city districts. Monster customization with unlockable forms, so you can build your own George. Physics based building destruction where every structure comes down realistically and leaves a pile of debris you can keep smashing. A campaign mode where you tour real world cities and a versus mode where you compete for demolition scores.

Keep the humor. Keep the weird food gags. Keep the toilet animation. Don't try to make Rampage prestige. Don't try to make it a narrative experience. Lean into the stupid, mean, joyful thing that Rampage always was and still is when you play the old cabinets.

Warner Bros. Games probably isn't going to make this. Which is a shame, because twenty years is long enough to wait, and the market for dumb destructive fun is larger now than it was in 1986. Some indie studio is going to get there first, and when they do, they'll call it something else, and we'll all pretend we don't know exactly where the DNA came from.

Long live George.