Monster Max

Monster Max is an isometric action-adventure puzzle video game that can be played in one of five language choices and two directional pad setups. The player is the titular aspiring rock star, who traverses nine floors of the Mega Hero Academy to overthrow the tyrannical King Krond, who resides on the tenth floor and bans all music performance in his land. The first floor has a training level, named the Play Pen. In each floor, Monster Max performs two-to-three tasks of which the reward is gold, which is used to purchase the elevator that takes him to the next floor.

Tasks include eliminating enemies and collecting objects like journals, safes, crowns, and torches. On the tenth floor, there is only one mission to complete before the Krond showdown: to collect four objects. Each room has a computer terminal informing the player the mission in the next room, although the current mission details can also be accessed in the pause menu.

Monster Max was designed and programmed by Jon Ritman with graphics by Bernie Drummond, both having established themselves in the video games industry by developing isometric 8-bit video games for Ocean Software, including Batman (1986) and Head over Heels (1987). Following Match Day II (1987), Ritman and Drummond moved to Rare, owned by the founders of Ultimate Play the Game, the developer and publisher of what launched the isometric game trend, Knight Lore (1984). Choosing to work for the company as an answer to an advertisement in Crash, and with respect for Ultimate, the two had their first project be an arcade football game named Final Whistle.

Although the software's design, visuals and code was finished in six months, the arcade cabinet was such a "time consumer" its hardware and graphics had to be re-done in another six months. Rare cancelled Final Whistle out of a perception of a lack of instant appeal to its target demographic. This led to a seven-year gap where the two were not public to the press and did not have work released. Ritman, after completing his own software development kit using a £1,200 Global Language Assembler Monitor (GLAM) that was used in other Rare games, wanted to develop a Game Boy product with it.

Upon release, Monster Max was frequently considered one of the best all-time Game Boy titles by critics. Nintendo Acción's Javier Abad

C. Mayerick called it the number-one best of all-time upon release; the latter critic still thought it was in the top-three in his 1997 re-review. Sam of Consoles + called it one of the best action-adventure entries in the Game Boy library. Several critics found it to be the closest in quality to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993) out of most other video games, a preview article from Super Gamer covering it as the biggest Game Boy game since the Zelda game.

Monster Max was Ritman's last game he coded by himself, before working for companies like Domark and Argonaut Games. It was also the final isometric game collaboration of Ritman and Drummond. It is one of three Game Boy games listed in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die (2010), where editor Tony Mott called it a "mini-masterpiece" with the best puzzles ever in isometric games. He highlighted how much diversity came out of the game's simple concepts, and how much personality was in low-resolution Game Boy graphics.

In 2021, it ranked number 95 on Retro Gamer's special edition of 100 Games To Play Before You Die: Nintendo Consoles Edition. In November 1997, in its 60th monthly issue, Nintendo Acción listed Monster Max the 35th best game they had ever reviewed.