Whatever Happened to Monster Rancher?

Andrew ponders about Monster Rancher

- Andrew Duncan

Raising creatures to fight one another was definitely a fad in the 1990s. Yes, Pokémon still exists, and Digimon is hanging on by a thread, but a couple of decades ago these games were everywhere. One of the earliest was Monster Rancher, known in Japan as Monster Farm. And it was released in the West before those Pocket Monsters were even called Pokémon!

In Monster Rancher, released in 1997 for the PlayStation, you had to raise a monster to get it stronger, so that it could win fights against other monsters. It had a unique gimmick, though, as you hatched the monsters from discs. Which discs? Any discs.

You went to the temple in-game and activated the altar. The game disc in your PlayStation would stop spinning, and you could then put any other CD inside the console. The game would then use the metadata on the CD to form a monster - some Christmas song CDs would give you a Hare named Santa! You could use music, games, copies of Windows 98, and even those free AOL discs that littered the landscapes of the 90s.

Of course, there was the possibility that two different CDs would make similar monsters, but there were over 200 obtainable creatures in the game. It was a lower chance than you having the same knock-off Tamagotchi as other people in your year group at school. Speaking of which, you could pop your memory card into your friend’s PlayStation to battle their monsters!