Retro City Rampage wants to be a lot of things at once. Vblank Entertainment’s 2012 action-adventure is a Grand Theft Auto parody, a tour of 1980s and ’90s pop culture, and a history lesson in 8-bit design, all delivered from a bird’s-eye view. It mostly works, and where it stumbles, it stumbles in ways that are easy to forgive.
Theftropolis, 1985
The setup is pure pastiche. In the city of Theftropolis, a thug for hire called “The Player” takes work as a henchman for a crime syndicate run by the Jester. Three years later, a botched bank heist sends him into a time-traveling telephone booth he steals from its owners.
The booth throws him to the year 20XX and breaks down. Doc Choc — a clear riff on Back to the Future’s Dr. Emmett Brown — arrives in his own time machine and mistakes him for a hero.
Repairing the booth means hunting rare parts across a city stuffed with references: Bayside High School students, law enforcement, and Dr. Von Buttnik, Doc Choc’s rival at the tech firm A.T. Corp. That plot is thin, and it knows it. The story is scaffolding for gags, not the other way around.
50 Missions and 16 Filters
The Grand Theft Auto borrowings are explicit. Players hijack vehicles, buy from shops, collect a wide assortment of weapons, and draw police attention through violence and destruction. Vblank planned around 50 story missions and 30 challenge levels.
The game borrows from many genres at once, and 16 graphical filters simulate old computers and consoles. Most of it plays top-down, though certain sections switch to a 2D platformer view. A Free Roaming Mode lets players explore and cause chaos, with unlockable characters from other indie games, including Super Meat Boy, Commander Video from Bit.Trip, and Steve from Minecraft.
The breadth is the point. It is also the problem: a game this wide rarely goes deep anywhere.
ROM City Rampage and the WiiWare Curse
The release history is its own story. Retro City Rampage launched October 9, 2012, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita and PC, then hit Xbox Live Arcade on January 2, 2013, and WiiWare on February 28, 2013.
On that last date, PC players got a free update containing ROM City Rampage, a port of the game to NES homebrew emulated inside it. Wii and 3DS versions included it, and it later reached PSN and Xbox Live.
The WiiWare release holds a stranger distinction: it was the last original game on the service globally until Deer Drive Legends was ported that November. An enhanced version, Retro City Rampage DX, followed on 3DS in 2014, and original ports were updated to it free. A sequel, Shakedown: Hawaii, arrived in 2019.
What the Parody Buys
Retro City Rampage is a parody that understands its targets well enough to build something playable on top of them. The 16 filters and the genre-hopping are not decoration; they are the argument, and they hold up. The mission design is where it thins out, and the Free Roaming Mode is more a toy than a game.
Still, the whole package is sharper and more generous than most nostalgia exercises. The ROM City Rampage update alone — a free NES port tucked inside a modern release — is the kind of move few studios bother with.
Key facts
– Release: October 9, 2012 (PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PC); January 2, 2013 (Xbox Live Arcade); February 28, 2013 (WiiWare)
– Developer: Vblank Entertainment
– Planned content: around 50 story missions, 30 challenge levels
– Graphical filters: 16
– Critic aggregate: 7.2/10 (6 outlets)
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
