My 11-year old niece and nephew were in town (twins) and really wanted to see Rampage. While I have no idea why they made a movie about this classic videogame, ironically, the 1986 flyer promoting the game to arcades literally imagined it as a movie:
Joshua Rivera has a great history of the making of the video game:
“We had come back from a trade show, and I was like ‘Hey, why can’t I do big stuff?’ Because with my pen-and-ink style, if you’ve seen the Rampage cabinet art, there’s a lot of comedy in there, and I wanted to make bigger characters so I could get that comedy across,” says Colin. “So I thought, hey, I’ll just do big background characters, and they told me no … There were so many things we couldn’t do.”
As an animator, Colin wanted to animate — but the limits of arcade hardware meant there was only so much that could be animated, particularly when it came to everything that wasn’t the player characters. Jeff Nauman summed up the limitations of animating backgrounds succinctly: “It’s gotta be a rectangle.”
Colin then turned to Sharon Perry, another artist on the Bally/Midway team, and said, “Okay, so buildings falling down.”
Now buildings falling down was great fun in the video game, and in Pacific Rim they made sure all the cities were evacuated so that the viewer wouldn’t feel guilty about buildings falling down, but the body count is higher and less comic in the Rampage movie than in the video game. The best thing about the movie for me was simply ending up playing the video game again.
You can play Rampage online here.
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