Altered Beast/Versions

Amstrad CPC
Ported by Soft Option and published by Activision in Europe in 1989.

Atari ST
Ported by Software Studios and published by Activision in both Europe and North American in 1989. Fairly faithful to the arcade, although a status bar occupies the lower portion of the screen.

Commodore 64
Ported by Software Studios and published by Activision in both Europe and North American in 1989.

Commodore Amiga
Ported by Software Studios and published by Activision in both Europe and North American in 1989. Fairly faithful to the arcade, although a status bar occupies the lower portion of the screen.

DOS
Ported by Unlimited Software and published by Sega in North America in 1990.

Famicom
Ported by Interlink and published by Asmik Ace Entertainment in Japan in 1990. Uses very small sprites with choppy animation. It contains three entirely new stages and transformations over the original game. The new transformations include a lion, a shark, and a phoenix.

MSX
Ported by New Frontier and published by Activision in Europe in 1989. Largely an unoptimized conversion of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum port.

Nintendo 3DS
Developed by M2 and published by Sega for the Nintendo 3DS, initially in Japan, and around the rest of the world in 2014. Made available under the title 3D Altered Beast. Although not based on the original arcade version, it uses the Sega Genesis version as its source, while enhancing it by adding three dimensional depth through the stereoscopic view of the system's screen.

PC Engine
Ported by Bits Laboratory and published in Japan by NEC Interchannel, initially in Super CD-ROM² format, in 1989. A stripped down version of the game was published in Hu-Card format just one week later. The CD version contains a narrated story introduction, but the game doesn't make use of the CD for audio; the CD and card music are identical. It includes the narrative images that appear between stages, which was removed from the Genesis version. Due to there being only two buttons on the PC Engine, jumping was moved to the up direction, which makes controlling the character a bit more difficult. Additionally, the difficulty of the game has increased considerably. If you try to play the CD version with any system card other than the version 1.0 card, the screen will stop scrolling when the first boss is supposed to appear and the game will not progress.

Sega Genesis
The third title published for the Sega Mega Drive after the two initial launch titles. It was ported by Sega in-house and published in Japan in 1988, in North America in 1989, and in Europe in 1990. Considerably faithful to the arcade version, although the sprites are a little smaller and fewer of them could occupy the screen at the same time. This conversion of the game was also released on the Wii Virtual Console in 2006. The original arcade version was later released for the Virtual Console in 2009. See the ../Secrets/ page for more information about cheat codes available in this version.

Sega Master System
Although Sega developed this conversion, and published it in North America, South America, and Europe in 1989, it was generally poorly received. Sega choose not to publish this game in Japan. There is a lot of flickering with the sprites, and the game only contains four levels.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Ported by Soft Option and published by Activision in Europe in 1989.