It was released as Tyrants: Fight Through Time in North America and Mega Lo Mania: Jikū Daisenryaku (メガロマニア時空大戦略) in Japan.
[2] Mega-Lo-Mania is an early real-time strategy game that predates Dune II by a year.
The player takes control of one of four gods; Scarlet (red), Caesar (green), Oberon (yellow) and Madcap (blue).
There are twenty-eight islands in the game, which are named in alphabetical order (except the last two) and grouped into ten epochs.
[1] The goal of this original design concept was to combine scrolling arcade action gameplay with real-time strategy; this concept is vastly different from the final product due to lack of publisher interest, as they considered the game to 'not fit into any specific category'.
[1] Jonathan Hare, Mega-Lo-Mania's graphic artist and one of its designers, expressed that the game was changed from its original concept to make it more marketable to publishers; he stated that the ultimatum became that the team needed to "drop the scrolling or drop the strategy", with the team deciding to scrap the game's arcade scrolling aspect.
[1] Upon scrapping the game's original concept of robots, the team considered a fantasy theme, but decided against it.
[1] Richard Joseph, Mega-Lo-Mania's composer and sound designer, hired radio voice actors to perform the game's sampled speech; Mega-Lo-Mania has over 50 speech samples, and due to their size, the sounds are on a floppy disk of their own.
[1] Mega-Lo-Mania is considered to be the first real time strategy game to also incorporate a technology tree and was met with universal acclaim on its original release.
Computer Gaming World cited many bugs and flaws, and stated that even if they were fixed "not enough attention has been paid to gameplay".