News, Offbeat, Retro

WTF?! Arcade Game ‘Rampage’ is Getting a Movie

Posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 8:52 PM by Jordan

Movie adaptations have always been intriguing to Hollywood, yet most of the time end up with some poor results.  But that’s not stopping movie studios from tapping the vast well of video game titles for inspiration…this time it’s Rampage.

THR got the scoop that New Line Cinema is now putting an adaptation of the popular 80s/90s arcade game (sure it had some later iterations, but nothing great), Rampage, into production.  You know, because there aren’t enough video games out there with a story or anything to make a movie out of…

John Rickard, who’s acted as producer for a number of New lIne projects over the years, has been brought on to produce the film and is currently meeting with writers to develop the story.  They’re going to need a whole lot of help on that front, considering that the game itself held very little story.  Hell just check out the synopsis for the game they came up with back in the day:

George, Lizzy and Ralph were just ordinary Americans, until an experiment went wrong, turning them into a Gorilla, Lizard and Werewolf respectively. Following this, the three of them plan to go round destroying buildings, and up to three human players can join in.

Smashing at the edges of the buildings for long enough will make them collapse. The police and military are after you, and will shoot at you, so try to destroy them (failing that, you can avoid the bullets). You will need to eat regularly, with things like plants on offer, to avoid shrinking back to being human.

Sounds totally radical!  Yeah, that’s all of the premise this movie really has to work with.  But hey, I guess if they can turn a board game based around putting little pegs into plastic ships into an big-budget alien invasion film (Battleship); then anything is possible.  It just kind of bums me out.  With all of the truly great games out there, with phenomenal stories that can’t seem to get a movie off the ground, it’s painful to see games like this get one instead.

Thems the brakes though!  So what do you guys think of a Rampage movie?

-Jordan

About the author: Jordan

I'm a retro gamer at heart. Even though I love playing the latest and newest games (on all of the consoles), I still find myself going back and playing the old consoles frequently as well.