Rampage: World Tour

Rampage: World Tour is a 1997 arcade action game developed by Game Refuge and published by Midway. It follows the 1986 Rampage coin-op and returns its giant, city-wrecking stars—George, Lizzie, and Ralph—to the arcade in a larger global campaign. The dedicated Midway cabinet supports up to three players at once, letting a group take control of the three monsters as they climb skyscrapers, smash their way through cities, and fight the forces trying to stop them.

Each player uses an eight-way joystick and three buttons to move a monster along the streets and up the sides of buildings. Punches, kicks, and other attacks tear away chunks of architecture, while people, food, and objects exposed inside the damaged structures can be grabbed. Food restores health, but other items can be harmful, so survival depends on recognizing what to eat, what to avoid, and when to get away from returning gunfire. Military vehicles, armed personnel, helicopters, and jets constantly turn the destruction back on the monsters.

A round centers on clearing a city by reducing its buildings to rubble. The monsters can strike from the ground or cling to a façade, moving across floors to reach windows and targets that are out of reach below. They also have to manage their health: a defeated creature changes back into a vulnerable human and must avoid danger long enough to recover. If the players take too long to finish a location, aircraft can bomb the remaining buildings, bringing the stage to a close while reducing the chance to score from the destruction themselves.

World Tour expands the series' familiar North American rampage into a route that can branch across international locations. In the opening city, players can affect their direction by destroying a sign while it displays a particular region, and World Tour items can send the group abroad for several stages. The campaign is tied to Scumlabs, the corrupt organization behind the monsters' predicament; its facilities are the important targets scattered through the itinerary. The route can therefore vary according to the choices and pickups made during play rather than following only one fixed sequence of cities.

The sequel adds more than new scenery to the basic demolition formula. Hidden bonuses can provide effects such as greater destructive power or rapid movement to another location, and radioactive waste in certain stages temporarily changes a character into V.E.R.N., a purple, bat-like super monster. These power-ups encourage players to inspect the interiors they expose and to decide whether a risky pickup is worth pursuing while enemies converge. The combination of shared screen action and the ability to cooperate or compete for food, points, and targets gives the arcade game a deliberately unruly multiplayer character.

Rampage: World Tour was designed by Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman, the designers associated with the original Rampage, and arrived in arcades in March 1997. Its colorful character animation and expanded travel concept kept the central premise simple: become a movie-monster-sized menace and demolish a city block by block. Home versions later appeared on several systems, but the arcade release is the version built around the Midway cabinet's three-player controls and immediate coin-op pace. It also became part of later Midway arcade compilations, preserving this 1990s continuation of the Rampage series alongside other games from the publisher's catalogue.