Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered: the couch game that finally noticed the couch had emptied

There are games whose menus I cannot recall, whose music I cannot hum, whose content I could barely describe, and yet I remember the room perfectly.

This one is a living room, a GameCube, four controllers of which two belonged to people who did not live there, and an unwritten rule: whoever played Mechagodzilla had to keep quiet for twenty minutes afterwards.

What it was, and why it worked

Destroy All Monsters Melee was never a good fighting game.

I say that with affection. The blows are heavy, the chains rudimentary, and any Tekken player of the era would have filed it under licensed tie-in. They were right on paper and entirely wrong about everything else.

Because what Pipeworks understood in 2002 is that nobody wants to play a kaiju in order to perform combos. You want to play one in order to flatten things. The game took that seriously: cities come apart, buildings fall, and when you pick up a tank to throw at somebody, the tank genuinely goes.

It is a destruction game dressed as a fighting game, which is why it survived in the memory of people who cannot name a single other Atari title from that period.

The one real addition in this remaster

There is one. Only one that matters, and it is enormous.

The game plays online.

In 2002, Destroy All Monsters Melee was built for four people in one room. That was its headline mode, its whole argument, and incidentally the reason it became impossible to revisit seriously after twenty-five years. The couch emptied. People moved away, had children, stopped being able to meet on a Tuesday evening.

A remaster that merely smoothed the textures would have delivered something beautiful and unplayable, to be shelved beside the memory and never switched on. By wiring in the network, Pipeworks is not modernising the game: it is making it usable again. Local co-op is still there, for the lucky ones whose living rooms still fill up.

That is the difference between restoring a building and reopening the road to it.

The rest of the additions, in descending order of usefulness

The unlock system has been taken apart and reassembled the right way round. You now choose the order in which you open monsters, locations and gallery items, instead of grinding through adventure mode hoping to land on the one you wanted. In 2002 that was the norm, in 2026 it is a chore nobody will miss.

Each kaiju has its own single-player campaign, which gives you a reason to try the other eleven when nobody is online.

Twelve monsters, eight locations with day and night variants, including recreated real-world cities, Monster Island and the alien mothership. For reference: the European GameCube version offered eleven, the Xbox version the following year twelve. In other words you get the complete cast of the era, with no additional guest. If you were hoping for a kaiju that had never been playable, you are out of luck, and it is the one place I would have liked a risk taken.

What mildly annoys me

The combat interface is flatter than the GameCube's. A player put it better than I can: the HUD has lost its personality. On the original, the gauges and icons belonged to the same graphical world as everything else, slightly kitsch and entirely committed. Here it is clean and anonymous.

It is a detail. But in a game whose whole appeal rests on the fidelity of an atmosphere, details are the product.

The other point is the price. 29.99 euros with no launch discount, for a game from 2002. Atari is apologising for nothing, which is at least consistent. At that rate you are buying a rare licence, an online layer that never existed, and the certainty that it runs. You are not buying a quantity of content that would justify the figure on its own.

The reception, which says a lot

95 per cent positive. And above all, a tone I rarely see.

Players are not discussing the game, they are discussing themselves. One recalls renting it on loop as a child and rebuying it on every machine available since. Another describes evenings with his brother and says he has been waiting years for this. Several beg everyone else to buy it so that Save the Earth gets remastered next.

That is not criticism, it is a vote. And it is worth being honest about its value: a community buying out of loyalty will not tell you whether the game stands up to a fresh audience.

So let us be clear for the fresh audience. If you have no attachment to Godzilla and no memory of that console generation, you will find a simple fighting game with very handsome scenery damage, and you will have seen everything in three evenings.

What a remaster owes you

There is a question I ask every time an old game returns, and it does not have the same answer every time.

For a strategy game, a remaster should look at what has aged in the systems and repair it. For a game about giant monsters hitting each other, the systems were never the point. What had aged here was not the game, it was the conditions under which you could play it.

Pipeworks identified the right problem and fixed it. That is less spectacular than a redesign, and considerably more useful.

What remains to be seen is how long the servers stay populated, because a game whose main argument is multiplayer also gets judged at six months. 2,300 people online on launch day is healthy. We will revisit in January.

Did your group have a house rule banning somebody from picking Mechagodzilla? Bring the case to the InsertCoins Discord and we will rule on it.