Primal Rage

About Primal Rage

Primal Rage (1994) is Atari Games' stop-motion dinosaur and ape fighting game set on a post-apocalyptic "Urth", whose gory finishing moves made it a hit, a merchandising success and a target of controversy.

Primal Rage in Depth

Seven prehistoric beast-gods fight one-on-one: Blizzard, the ape god of good; Armadon, god of life; the raptor Talon, god of survival; the tyrannosaur Sauron, god of hunger; Chaos, the ape god of decay; Vertigo, the cobra goddess of insanity; and Diablo, the tyrannosaur god of evil. Each fights in its own domain, from the Cliff to the Inferno. Human worshippers wander the arenas and can be tossed about or eaten to regain health, scoring a bonus for eating the opponent's followers and a penalty for eating one's own. Before the final battle against every other monster, a minigame lets the player eat as many worshippers as possible to boost health for the endurance round. Two players can trigger hidden volleyball and bowling minigames played with humans.

Unusually, special moves are performed by holding buttons and then moving the joystick, though later arcade revisions also accepted the usual motion-then-button method. After a win, players can perform finishing moves, some of them comic, such as Vertigo turning her opponent into a cow. The setting is an Earth devastated by a meteor strike, its people reduced to Stone Age tribes and its continents shifted into the shape of a dinosaur skull.

Making Primal Rage

Production coordinator Stephen Riesenberger said it was designed to be accessible, with four buttons rather than six and special moves easy to pull off by button mashing. Time Warner Interactive released it in arcades in August 1994 in standard and deluxe cabinets, and RePlay reported it as the third most popular deluxe arcade game. Next Generation called it "an excellent show of graphics and sound design tarnished by unbalanced gameplay". It was ported to the Genesis, SNES, Game Boy, Game Gear, 3DO, 32X, Jaguar CD, PlayStation, Saturn, MS-DOS and Amiga, with reviews ranging from praise for the handheld versions to criticism of small sprites on the 16-bit consoles and dated play on the later ones. It sold more than 1.5 million copies and was nominated for the VSDA's game of the year. A sequel, Primal Rage II, was cancelled in development, its story later told in the novel Primal Rage: The Avatars.