The player is the titular aspiring rock star, who, in an attempt to fight King Krond who bans all music, traverses nine floors of the Mega Hero Academy.

The game was specifically developed by a three-member team, which consisted of Jon Ritman for programming and design, Bernie Drummond for graphics, and David Wise for music.

Ritman and Drummond, before joining Rare, developed isometric games for Ocean Software, including Batman (1986) and Head over Heels (1987).

Ritman decided to work on an isometric Game Boy title with a £1,200 Global Language Assembler Monitor software development kit he created by himself, noticing the handheld console's absence of the genre.

Despite a delay in release that negatively impacted sales, Monster Max was critically acclaimed, its quality being compared to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993).

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.

[12][17][18] Three objects give Max maneuver abilities: a bolt of lightning that increases walking speed, a duck that allows him to squat into smalls areas, and boots that enable him to jump.

[5] 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.

[19] He chose an isometric game, noticing that the genre was absent in the console's library, but possible given its inclusion of a Zilog Z80-like chip and more memory than the ZX Spectrum.

[1][21] When Ritman called Drummond about a potential Game Boy project, the artist's latest drawing was a half-reptilian/half-skeleton guitarist that became the titular playable character.

[5] Ritman described the Game Boy's chip as a "castrated Z80", where "two-thirds of the registers had gone AWOL as had the 16-bit maths instructions, and that made even the simplest of programs very hard work indeed.

[4] The final cartridge packs twice the memory of Head Over Heels: two megabytes, one for the 630 rooms, and another for menus, text data for five languages, and an advert for an unreleased Titus game, Blues Brothers Pinball.

[4][5][19] Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions of Ritman and Drummond's previous work were referenced, and some concepts were borrowed, easing the development process.

[4] In a departure from Ritman's previous titles, Monster Max limited its collectible abilities to two at a time, to match the number of buttons on the Game Boy.

[4] This design decision also pressured him to focus on the order of rooms to avoid situations where the player accidentally drops an item in an area he can not return to.

In a situation rare in his career due to his attention to detail to problems, he was required to fix a bug that occurred in the seventh level, where an icon flashed on screen for around three seconds.

"[9][3][25] Ritman explained in a retrospective interview that Titus gave him the opportunity for Monster Max to be officially published by Nintendo if the playable character was from the Mario series (1981–present).

Nintendo Acción's Javier Abad and Superjuegos's J.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.

[8] Monster Max was widely praised for its challenge and variety in level design, requiring the player to be skillful and constantly think and motivating weeks of play.

[d] Reviewers were amazed by how huge the room quantity, level size and graphical detail was as well as how it was executed with little slowdown, all considered impressive for a Game Boy catridge.

[3][16] Damian appreciated touches in the presentation to make the product appealing to a wide audience, such as a blipvert that pops up every time an object is collected.