Yorkville man had hand in creating 'Rampage' game that inspired hit movie

Years before “Rampage” was a smashing success as an arcade and computer game in the 1980s and decades before it was a major motion picture starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the idea was birthed in part by a guy from Plano, Illinois.

Jeff Nauman, who graduated in 1977 from Plano High School and was raised in Plattville and Yorkville, created the “Rampage” game with Brian Colin, a Midway designer whom Nauman teamed with on several arcade products of the 1980s and 1990s.

Nauman, who now lives with his family in Yorkville, was a college student at Northern Illinois University studying probability and statistics when he joined Bally/Midway and started his career as a game programmer and designer during the arcade boom of the 1980s.

Nauman said he played softball with a fellow Plano product, Bill Adams, who at the time worked for Bally/Midway, a company that was growing by leaps and bounds at the time after publishing arcade games such as “Space Invaders” in 1978 and the ubiquitous “Pac-Man” in 1980. One day, Adams mentioned to him and another friend that the company was hiring.

“[Adams] said, ‘Hey guys, you’re into this type of stuff, you wanna be a grunt? We’ll pay for your senior year of college,’” Nauman recalled. “At the time I was like, you’re paying for anything? I’ll do anything you want, it doesn’t matter.”

Nauman said when he started at Bally/Midway, his job was doing “whatever the main programmers needed you to do,” including running errands and other menial tasks. In the meantime, however, they let the “grunts” test out the arcade games. In his senior year of college, Nauman switched his major to programming and transferred to Aurora University, where he would graduate.

“At the time, Ms. Pac-Man was on the assembly line,” he said.

The first game Nauman worked on as a Bally/Midway staffer was Satan’s Hollow, released in 1982.

“I thought, this is fun, and I’ve been doing them ever since,” he said.

The design team for an arcade game at the time was small in scale, Nauman explained.

“Back in those times, the programmer was basically the game designer,” he said. “For a team back then you’d have an artist, maybe two, a programmer, and a sound guy. That’s it.”

Most games in the 1980s took several months from being an idea to seeing them on the floor of the Aladdin’s Castle at one’s local mall.

“They would take anywhere from six to nine months, because you had a lot of limitations,” he said. “I think Rampage I worked on for about nine months, from the time we started the game until the time it was in the field.”

Designing an arcade game had a different goal than designing a video game for a home console, which began gaining in popularity in the late ‘80s. The goal for an arcade game was to keep the players playing, Nauman said.

“It was at the boom of the arcade industry, so you were just trying to come up with ideas that would make money,” he said. “For the arcade game, it’s way different than for the home [gaming systems]. People yelled at me many times because there was no ending to ‘Rampage.’”

Nauman said it was difficult to “lose” in “Rampage” because the hits did very little damage. As a result, gamers could potentially play for hours, he said.

In 1986, “Rampage” was a unique arcade game for the market, Nauman said. The multiplayer ability allowed players to plunk more of those quarters into the machine at once.

“‘Rampage’ was different in many ways – first of all, there weren’t many multiplayer games, let alone three-player,” he said. “Gauntlet had just come out as a four-player game. The more people you have putting quarters in, the more money the game is gonna make.”

The game did not have the smoother graphics that were being shown at trade shows by other companies, Nauman said, so the team worked with what they had. The original game was designed using 8-pixel-by-8-pixel graphic blocks, Nauman explained.

“You had so many on the screen, and that was it,” he said. “So what we did is, for the buildings, we redrew them seven times and then I would replace them. So the dust cloud at the bottom was to hide the fact that they would be snapping off. If we kept things in rectangles, we could have the scrolling [effect], so that’s why the buildings [were rectangular]. It was basically a way to do something fun with the hardware that didn’t have the capability of doing it.”

“Rampage” was an immediate hit and Nauman said the brand was licensed out for other gaming products.

“They put Rampage on everything,” he said. “Some versions were done better than others. Some they just sold the rights to it and every little shop all over the place was doing them. Some people would ask me, what did you do, how did you do it, and other people would just do it. And I could tell the difference between the ones that actually cared and the ones who did a quick copy without paying attention.”

Over his career, Nauman teamed up with Colin on a myriad of games, including “Arch Rivals,” a basketball video game that was the forerunner for the immensely popular 1990s video game “NBA Jam,” along with a football game called “Pigskin 621 A.D.” and a game for the Sega Genesis called “General Chaos.”

Nauman and Colin would eventually open their own design and development studio called Game Refuge in 1992; Colin still runs the company.

But Nauman said “Rampage” was one of the biggest hits he ever worked on, and with the recent movie it “way surpasses anything else.”

Nauman said he liked to put hometown touches or include references to family members, including his own children, in the games. A game he worked on called “Demolition Derby,” for example, was based on the demolition derby held at the Sandwich Fair, he said.

“In ‘Rampage,’ the original one, the last city you destroyed was Plano, Illinois,” he said. “I lived in Plano at the time I did the game. When I did ‘Rampage World Tour’ [the sequel], I lived in Hinckley at the time, so the last city you destroy in ‘Rampage World Tour,’ except for the moon, is Hinckley, Illinois. My kids are in a lot of the games. In Rampage, you’ll see Dan’s Diner and that’s named for my oldest son Dan. I had another game where I put my daughter in it as a character.”

Nauman keeps a basement filled with arcade games he personally worked on, but he said while his children’s friends are often wowed, most of the time the games aren’t touched.

“We play pool more than we play any [arcade] games,” he said.

Nauman said he began to shift his focus to casino and bar games in the mid-2000s when it was more common for video game companies to have all of their programming and design services in-house. He said it’s worked out well for him.

“For me doing the casino stuff, I went to school for math, I’ve been doing game design for years; there’s not a better marriage,” he said.

Nauman said he’s looking at a possible retirement in six years but that he still loves what he does.

“Basically, I’m gonna work until I no longer have fun,” he said.

Meanwhile, “Rampage” the movie is a raging success at the box office, having made around $93 million domestically and nearly $408 million worldwide, according to the movie industry website Box Office Mojo.

During the filming of the movie, his son helped Nauman get in contact with Jason Liles, the 6-foot-9 actor who was the stand-in for George, the massive albino gorilla in the film. When Nauman was out in Los Angeles, the two sat down for coffee and had a lengthy conversation about the game and the film, he said.

Nauman also visited the set during the last days of filming in Chicago. He might end up on one of the behind-the-scenes features on the DVD being interviewed about his role in the creation of the game.

Nauman said he gathered dozens of friends and family for the movie’s opening night and watched it at NCG Cinemas in Yorkville, with an after-party at Southbank Original BBQ downtown. He said he doesn’t make any money from the movie, and joked that he had spent around $1,000 between the party and the “Rampage” promotional toys he bought, but that he loved the film.

“I didn’t make a penny from the movie, but it’s worth every penny,” he said.

Nauman said the movie stayed true to the game that he and Colin worked on more than 30 years ago.

“There are a lot of little things that they could have done a different way, if they weren’t trying to give a nod to the game,” he said. “Those are the moments that I saw and was like, that is so cool.”