| Monster Max | |
|---|---|
 Cover art | |
| Developer(s) | Rare |
| Publisher(s) | Titus France |
| Designer(s) | Jon Ritman |
| Programmer(s) | Jon Ritman |
| Artist(s) | Bernie Drummond |
| Composer(s) | David Wise |
| Platform(s) | Game Boy |
| Release | |
| Genre(s) | Action-adventure, puzzle |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Monster Max is a 1994 action-adventure puzzle video game developed by Rare and published by Titus France in Europe for the Game Boy. The player is the titular aspiring rock star, who, in an attempt to fight King Krond who bans all music, traverses nine floors of the Mega Hero Academy. Floors consist of diversely-designed rooms of puzzles to solve, the player having to figure out the order of actions to take.
The game was specifically developed by a three-member team, which consisted of Jon Ritman for programming and design, Bernie Drummond for graphics, and David Wise for music. Ritman and Drummond, before joining Rare, developed isometric games for Ocean Software, including Batman (1986) and Head over Heels (1987). As a result of the failure of an arcade football game to be completed for the company, Ritman and Drummond did not have any publicity with their work for seven years. Ritman decided to work on an isometric Game Boy title with a £1,200 Global Language Assembler Monitor software development kit he created by himself, noticing the handheld console's absence of the genre.
Production lasted nine months and ended in January 1993. It was complicated by quirks and complexities of the Game Boy's hardware, such as low resolution, constant memory paging and the differences in character encoding between the bottom third and top two thirds of the screen. Ritman and Drummond borrowed some concepts from their earlier isometric games while adding new aspects to the genre, including bigger room sizes and the inclusion of floors with different themes and room design.
Despite a delay in release that negatively impacted sales, Monster Max was critically acclaimed and this acclaim led to its quality being compared to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993). Core praises were its ability to hold huge levels, several rooms, and high graphical detail on a Game Boy cartridge, and the variety and challenge from the design of the rooms. It was one of three Game Boy entries in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die (2010), where it was called a "mini-masterpiece" with the best puzzles of any isometric game.