American Gladiators is a video game developed by Incredible Technologies and released in 1991 by GameTek for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Ports were published in 1992 for Amiga and MS-DOS compatible operating systems, and then in 1993 for Genesis and Super NES, by Imagitec Design.

The wall was a particularly tough event due to its difficult controls that involved repeated rhythmic tapping of the A and B buttons with the directional pad to simulate the movement of the left and right hands to different handholds.

Medicine balls were constantly arcing up from the bottom of the screen towards the player, attempting to knock them back and possibly off the I-beams to the ground below, thus ending the run.

By the time American Gladiators was released for the SNES, Amiga, and Genesis, the developers had changed the game to a more faithful copy of the television series.

While acknowledging how limited the gameplay was, writing "the events seem to last for about ten seconds as the Gladiators wipe the floor with you", he concluded that the overall product worked as "a simple, no-nonsense all out action game", considering it especially fun when playing with other human gamers.

writer Chris, rating it an extremely low 6% and calling it "complete crap", argued the controls were "universally tragic and make the game even less enjoyable".

[13][20][16] Nintendo Power also found the gameplay awkward in addition to being too simple, criticizing the control setups that were so odd and unlike the real experiences a player would have to read the manual to figure them out.

[25] Steve Keen of Computer & Video Games wrote "the gameplay is repetitive and rapidly dulls the brain", his only positive points being the ability to switch perspectives in Assault and the variety of obstacles in Eliminator.

[15] Even Arnie Katz' positive review from Electronic Games claimed the product could have used more features, such as more close-ups of the Gladiators and a practice mode: "The inability to concentrate on one event at a time to perfect technique is frustrating".

[13][25] Conversely, MegaTech's Radion Automatic and Super Play's Jonathan Davies argued it lacked the source material's tongue-in-cheek, "showbizzy" atmosphere.

[20] Keen called the visuals unfathomably bad for the SNES and "the biggest pile of crap we've seen since King Kong was half way up the Empire S[t]ate Building and fancied a cack!".

He condemned the small sprites and active areas of Powerball and Atlasphere during two-player mode, feeling they hindered the flow of the gameplay and made moving around the space harder.