Altered Beast - On this day

In today’s calendar, we go back three decades, to the day the 2D title Altered Beast for the Sega Mega Drive console came out in Japan. The console version was a customized version of the arcade game that came out a few months earlier.

In Altered Beast, we take on the role of a Roman centurion who is revived by Zeus to send him on a mission to rescue his daughter Athena. To be able to perform this task, the main character is allowed to turn into a beast - a werewolf, a dragon, and a bear. It was these transformations that many players remembered - even if you didn't know the name of the game, you called it "the one where you turn into a werewolf".

The version of the game for the Sega Mega Drive console was graphically inferior, but it came bundled with the console itself, which is why it became popular among gamers. Interestingly, the game has influenced several musicians who have named their albums, songs, and even bands after Sega’s Games.

Altered Beast later appeared on a bunch of other platforms, including NES and DOS, and more recently iOS, Android, 3DS, and others. In 2005, a kind of remake of the game was made for the PlayStation 2 console, but it did not go unnoticed. The original game is included in a bunch of Sega collections, and today it can be played on modern gaming platforms with the Sega Mega Drive and Genesis Classics collection.