Retro Sci-Fi Games: Mighty Men & Monster Maker

It seems almost impossible to fall over in a game store without knocking over a few dozen sci-fi themed games, so we wanted to take a look at the ten best examples of the genre. Our twist? Retro! So here’s one glimpse of the future from the past:

Mighty Men & Monster Maker

It has been said before, but memory is an odd thing. You can be minding your own business, idly cruising through the nether-regions of the intertoobes, when all-of-a-sudden you see something that instantly sends you through the looking glass. You’re two feet shorter and [redacted] years younger. The light looks oddly diffuse, the walls tower over you at strange angles and you’re laying on your grandmother’s living room floor forming weird creatures and mental dreamscapes with Tomy’s Mighty Men & Monster Maker.

The MM&MM was a brilliantly creative yet simply tool. You were essentially limited to the forms that were provided on the 18 different panels, but you were able to combine them in hundreds of different ways. While it’s obvious that there was a “right” way to build each set of parts using the head, body and leg plates, the whole point is to mix things up. What colors you chose to adorn your creations with was also a major factor. The three-eyed and four-armed guy with the lizard legs was always way cooler in red than yellow. Red guys breathe fire.

While not necessarily a game in the strictest sense, it was no less fun to play. Winning was just a matter of making the coolest and most outrageous looking creature and building a universe around it in your head. The MM&MM was one of those items that only gave back as much as you were willing to put into it, the mark of any truly great sci-fi story.

Zac Bentz is a regular contributor to the Japanese culture blog Japanator, runs his own Japanese music review blog ZB’s A-Z of J-Music and plays crazy electro-rock in The Surfactants. He lives in Duluth, MN with his wife, pets and a closet full of adventure.