Paying tribute to Sega’s Altered Beast, a horror-adjacent arcade game that (kinda) defined a generation
Altered Beast is largely remembered as a Sega Genesis game — and for good reason. When the 16-bit console was initially released in 1989 Altered Beast was its pack-in game; i.e., the title meant to showcase all of the technological capabilities of the new hardware. If you were an early, early adaptor of the Genesis (known as the Mega Drive pretty much everywhere except the U.S.) Altered Beast was probably the very first game on the system you ever played.
Before the Genesis game, though, there was the arcade original. The coin-op title debuted in 1988, at a time when the arcade industry was already starting to go through some seismic changes. While Altered Beast was essentially a fairly rudimentary action game (you keep moving right and killing everything until you run out of things to kill), it did distinguish itself from the competition with its werewolf gimmick. Well, technically, there are a lot of other were-things going on in this game — were-dragons and were-bears and were-tigers, among others. But the werewolf was front and center, with prominent placement on the title screen and the game cabinet itself. Altered Beast, no matter how many caveats you want to toss at it, is and always will be be “that one werewolf game from Sega,” even if the description is a little misleading.
I’m sure a lot of people consider Altered Beast to be a shameless ripoff of Capcom’s Ghosts N Goblins, an earlier game that had you fighting the forces of evil in various states of undress. Sega’s game has something of a Greek mythology vibe to it, even if the game plays it fast and loose with established Greek lore. It’s your basic video game fantasy nonsense — an evil sorcerer (who looks a LOT like Robert Englund in the cut scenes between stages) kidnaps a damsel in distress, so Zeus decides to resurrect your character from the dead to rescue her and exact as much murderous revenge as possible in the process. Even in 1988 this was pretty routine fare, but the game’s transformation hook gave it instant appeal to even the most jaded of hardened arcade-goers.
In each stage of Altered Beast you have to kill white wolves so you can harvest these orbs from them that make you muscular, then really muscular, then turn you into some sort of super powerful chimera. If you don’t collect three orbs, the levels just scroll on forever and each stage’s concluding boss fight is never triggered. It might seem like humdrum stuff today, but the transformation scenes in Altered Beast were quite impressive at the time. In terms of graphics and audio, it definitely looked and sounded better than most of its contemporaries. Heck, some lines from Altered Beast have even gone onto become iconic gaming memes— that warbled “rise from your grave” command at the beginning of the title obviously being the most famous.
Gameplay-wise, Altered Beast is straight forward stuff. There are only five stages and you literally do the exact same thing in each of them. Sure, some stages have more jumping than others, but the M.O. is the samw from start to finish. The backgrounds obviously change, though, and each stage has its own unique set of enemies, running the gamut from zombies that hold their own severed heads in their arms to bipedal wasps that try to suicide bomb you to these leaping blob creatures that try to slurp your head off. Long story short, they’re all gruesome little buggers and they’re all annoying as hell. Naturally, it’s a pleasure and delight to wipe every last one of them off the face of the Earth (or whatever alternate reality this game is supposed to take place in, I suppose.)
The games does offer a two-player mode and really, that’s the best way to play Altered Beast, especially considering how short it is. It’s also low-key infamous for basically allowing you engage in acts of simulated mating — and trust me, teens in the late 1980s found that out quickly. You just stand behind the other player, twist the joystick up and down and voila, instant Discovery Channel special.
While the game doesn’t feature any blood or guts, it does manage to get away with a lot more violence and straight up body horror than you might expect. For one thing, enemies literally explode into chunks of severed limbs, complete with dismembered arms and legs flying towards the player. And many of the boss enemies are truly grotesque — these mountainous piles of eyeballs and polyps that looks like something culled from the nightmares of Clive Barker. I’m sure it sounds tame by today’s standard, but you have to remember this game came out in the midst of the Satanic Panic moral hysteria. And compared to Mario, a would-be company mascot that turns into unholy manimal killing machines was undoubtedly pushing the boundaries.
Probably the coolest thing about Altered Beast is an element that didn’t make it into the Sega Genesis port. Once you beat the game — assuming you have enough quarters and figure out how to cheap shot your way past the final half man, half rhinoceros boss at the end of level five — you get a quick cut scene before the end credits indicating that the entire game was actually a fictitious movie being filmed … with the last image of the game being a static shot of all of the mainline characters celebrating with a post-wrap round of beers. Needless to say, it was very unusual to see arcade games get THIS meta during the Dan Quayle years — and even now it feels like a startlingly bizarre way to end the experience. I guess that explains the reels of celluloid painted onto the cabinet artwork, though.
The Altered Beast brand has had a longer life span than some gamers realize. It had ports to the Nintendo Entertainment System, a way late sequel on the Game Boy Advance and even a grim-dark reboot on the PS2 (which never came to America, because Sega probably knew better.) The big bad of the game even shows up as a prominent character in Wreck It Ralph, which was DEFINITELY a mind-blower for me the first time I watched the movie. ‘
There’s always the possibility that Sega could revisit the long in the tooth I.P., but I doubt any follow-up would have the overall impact that the ‘88 arcade original had. Altered Beast may not have been a classic, but it was certainly memorable — I mean, I still hear that little “power up!” sound effect in my head at the most random of intervals.
