Altered Beast is an action beat ‘em up arcade video game developed by Sega R&D1 and published by Sega in 1988 for the System 16 arcade hardware. It is the first game in the Altered Beast series and was quickly ported to the Sega Genesis by Sega’s R&D2 team. Sega wanted to boost sales for their new home console and strengthen their market share in order to get a head start in the 16-bit home console race over Nintendo. They did this by offering arcade ports that were extremely close in graphical quality as the arcade version of the game. Sega decided to use Altered Beast to showcase the power of their new home console the Sega Genesis and bundled it as a pack-in game in North America.

Designed by Makoto Uchida the game was the first project that he took on as the lead developer. Uchida was inspired by the 1981 horror film “The Howling” and Michael Jackson’s 1983 music video “Thriller”. The game is set in Ancient Greece and begins when Zeus resurrects the game’s protagonist to rescue his daughter Athena from the ruler of the underworld, Neff. Players have the ability to collect power-ups which will transform their character into different magical beast.

When the game initially released in Japanese arcades in June 1988 it saw little success however was vastly popular when released in North America. As a result of its popularity in the west, Sega ported the game and bundled it with the Sega Genesis system in North America and the Sega Mega Drive in Europe. In addition to the Genesis / Mega Drive port, Sega also ported the game to the Master System and allowed other publishers and developers to port the game to various systems ranging from the Family Computer to the PC Engine.