Rampage: World Tour

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howtoloseatvideogames

On:

August 12, 2026

Developer: Midway (Arcade Original), Saffire Corporation (Port) Publisher: Midway

Released: March 30, 1998 Rated: T 6/10

The original side-scrolling “smash-‘em-up,” as the franchise likes to call itself, got a healthy reboot in 1997, when Midway’s original three-player monster sim Rampage returned to arcades with Rampage: World Tour in 1997. A home port naturally followed and players were able to bring home George, Ralph, and Lizzie and take them on a trek around the globe, smashing, stomping, and eating everything in sight.

Troll 2 vibes (“They’re eating her, and then they’re going to eat me. Oh. My god.”)

As far as Rampage as a series and a concept is concerned, it’s quite a brilliant one, actually, and perfect for arcades. Players can crowd up to three around a machine and jockey for position with their friends as much as actual enemies or hazards, focusing as much on the fact that their buddy playing Lizzie got the bonus for that large fry in the seventh story window and want to get back at them, ignoring the fact that the pea shooter tank on the ground is chipping away half their health bar until it’s too late and they’ve got to pop in another quarter to stay in. Climbing up and down buildings and punching in each window looking for treats, kicking puny cars across busy metropolitan streets, and batting Apache helicopters out of the sky like mosquitoes is a blast. It’s a game based on largely aimless fun, but with the scientific method at play practically the entire time — observe the power-up, theorize what it will do, is it good or bad? Is it worth it? Experiment! Okay, no, don’t punch the toilet, it sprays us in the face. Lizzie, this is what I’ve observed, let’s change a variable and have you try it. Excellent. Still not helpful. Moving on.

Man in the red hat really lucked out on the day he brought his sniper rifle to the book depository.

Where Rampage: World Tour ultimately fails in the long run is essentially, well, that the run is too long. As an arcade game in its original environment, Rampage works quite well and never seems boring, because as soon as you tire of it, you can just walk away, unless you’re on some crazy run on the same credit, which is always exciting. At home, on a console and game you’ve paid a lump sum for? Over 130 levels gets very repetitive. Thankfully you can save your progress and come back to it, but even over a few sessions, playing around five or six hours of Rampage to play the game through is kind of both too short for the amount of time you imagine a game giving you, but too long for a game that has you do the same thing over and over again by design. Something to keep in mind for this game as a stand-alone title in your collection, rather than a part of a larger compilation like it would become later on, context really always sort of dictates the perception of this series, if we’re being honest here.

Continuing Legacy

It’s not often that an N64 game has a more recent film based on its IP than a new game, but that’s the case for Rampage, and its 2018 film adaptation starring The Rock. As far as games, the franchise last saw a new release in 2006 with Total Destruction for PS2, GameCube, and later, Wii. It’s a fair update to the franchise, now offering a z-axis on which to move about each city, and mostly focuses on featuring lots of characters, but suffers from a similar lack of depth over its runtime.