Rampage

Rampage for Sega Master System is Sega’s 1988 conversion of Bally Midway’s 1986 monster-destruction arcade game. This action game puts players on the destructive side of a city-under-siege story: choose George the ape, Lizzie the lizard, or Ralph the wolf and tear through a sequence of American cities. Sega developed and published the Master System version in Europe and Australia, while Activision published it in North America the following year. Although it stems from a three-player coin-op, this home cartridge is designed for one or two players.

The objective in Rampage is direct but demanding. Each area is cleared by reducing every building to rubble while surviving the counterattack from soldiers, helicopters, and other hazards. A monster walks along the street, climbs a building by moving against it and pressing up, and punches in the chosen direction with the first button. Striking façades opens holes in which people, food, and dangerous objects can appear. Buildings do not merely provide scenery: they are the central targets, climbing frames, and sources of moment-to-moment risks and rewards.

The Master System controls add a dedicated jump on the second button. Jumping lets a monster move around the city and can help avoid the serious damage caused by an accidental fall from a crumbling building. The damage bar beneath the score tracks each creature’s condition. Enemy fire and mishaps steadily drain it, but edible items can restore the energy needed to remain monstrous. If the bar is exhausted, the character reverts to human form, making survival as important as enthusiastic demolition. Not every item uncovered in a building is beneficial, so deciding what to eat is part of the game’s quick arcade-style judgment.

George, Lizzie, and Ralph give the same basic mission different personalities. The manual characterizes Ralph as the strongest puncher, George as the most capable building climber, and Lizzie as the fastest. At the start, players select their monster, with two people able to choose separately when playing together. Co-operative play can turn competitive as well: monsters may hit one another for points, while both participants still need to eliminate the city’s structures and cope with its defenses. That mixture of shared objectives, physical interference, and two-button controls preserves the immediate appeal of the arcade premise on Sega’s 8-bit console.

Rather than using the arcade game’s long tour of North America, Rampage on Master System presents ten named cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York—each with five landscapes to destroy. The change gives this version a defined, compact route while keeping the series’ signature reversal of perspective: the player is the giant creature confronting an ordinary city and its military response. Its Master System conversion belongs to the broader group of home versions that carried Rampage beyond the arcade, a game whose monster trio later anchored further entries in the series.