Before clone games, before AI canvases, before live-service collectibles — there was a campy 3D fighting game built around assembled monsters and patented Digital Trading Cards. This is the paper trail.
MonsterLab was conceived by Michael A. Pace as the premier fighting game for the SEGA Dreamcast — combining 3D combat with a deep creation system where every monster part was a collectible Digital Trading Card. Players would build, modify, battle, trade, and barter parts both locally and online, years before live-service collectible economies became standard.
Monsters consist of six main parts — a torso, a head, two arms, two legs. Each part is a DTC: Digital Trading Card with its own colors, textures, shapes, and attributes. Win a battle, take an opponent's part. Lose, give one up. Trade or buy missing parts online or in retail.
The fighting style was deliberately closer to Clay Fighter than Tekken: campy, exaggerated, full of hair-pulling, snot-blowing, noogies, and zit-popping. Wrestling with monsters, not simulation combat.
The opening cinematic, written in 1999, frames the entire quest. The monster dissolves into slime at your feet, leaving only the eyeball. The manuscript hovers in mid-air, and Dr. Stein — dismembered, scattered across his own lab — speaks through it.
You've been chosen to save the world from a terrible fate
Make up your mind before it's too late…
Evil monsters are loose, they're ugly indeed
Roaming under my castle in abundance like weeds…
I am Dr. Stein and they've torn me apart
They've left me in pieces with no place to start…
But fear not, 'cause beneath my castle and inside my lab
You'll find good monsters in need of rehab…
Kindly put them together and call them by name
They'll fight off the bad ones and drive them insane…
With courage, collect the clues on your way
I've left them for you in the words that I say…
Find the source to defeat evil once and for all
Shut them down and make them fall…
Pick up the eyeball and feel your fate
The night is young and the monsters wait…
This power bolt will help you to fight
It will fly you to my castle on this very night…
The world is at stake so be on your way
Pick up the eyeball and save the day!
You pick up the eyeball. A lightning bolt shatters the window, wraps around your body, and hurls you to Dr. Stein's laboratory. The eyeball leaps from your hand, bounces over to Dr. Stein's dismembered head, and briefly brings him to life. He tells you: "The evil Dr. Von Gersdorf has stolen his Book of Monster Formulas. You must retrieve it before his monsters take over the world."
The 1999 design document names a small core cast and signals a roster of ten boss monsters across ten castle levels. The hero — you — is a player avatar guided by the disembodied head of Dr. Stein.
The original mad scientist of MonsterLab. Torn apart by his own creations and scattered across his castle. His dismembered head is reanimated by a single eyeball just long enough to send the player on their quest to recover the Book of Monster Formulas.
Dr. Stein's former assistant. The traitor. Stole the Book of Monster Formulas and retreated to the deepest corner of the castle dungeon, where he now creates evil monsters and commands a horde of creatures across the castle's ten levels.
Runs the online Body Shop. For a small e‑money fee, he'll assemble a monster from cards you provide — for players who lack the Monster Glue or patience to build their own. The first instance of an in-game economy NPC in the MonsterLab universe.
The player. Pulled into the story by a power bolt the moment they pick up the eyeball. Default loadout: one monster torso with two randomly-attached appendages, plus two spare parts and Monster Glue in the meat-locker inventory.
The three signature creatures from the 1998 DTC poster: a tall, purple, melting beast with exposed bones; a polka-dotted three-eyed cyclops in red coveralls; and a green spotted hulk with razor teeth, holding balloons. They define the look — campy horror, hand-painted, cartoonishly gross.
The 1999 doc specifies ten end-of-level bosses, one per castle level. Each, when defeated, relinquishes a predetermined Super DTC — a rare trading card that can be brought online and traded in (along with the recovered Book of Monster Formulas) for a Super Monster Trading Card.
Quest/Story Mode is a Mario 64-style first-person 3D exploration of Dr. Stein's castle and the surrounding town of Sleepytown. Below the castle lies a vast labyrinth of corridors and dungeons teeming with monsters. Each level has its own end-boss and its own arena that reappears in Versus and Online Battle Modes.
Default starting location. On one wall: a door to the Meat Locker — your inventory of monster parts hanging from hooks, alongside a can of Monster Glue. On the opposite wall: the huge door to Quest/Story Mode.
The inventory. Every item — torso, head, arm, leg, glue can, monster-enhancement formula — appears as a hanging DTC: Digital Trading Card. Two check boxes per card: connection status, and willing-to-trade.
The expanded framing of the world divides the castle HQ into three labs — one for each branch of mad science. Each lab is run by its own mad scientist, each produces a class of monster parts, and each is strong against one branch and weak against another.
Makes mechanical parts — gear-and-steam Victorian contraptions or shiny futuristic chrome. Pistons, hydraulic claws, rivets, brass plating.
Living parts. Heavy on plants, human flesh, animal tissue. Vines, tendrils, organs, fur, claws, teeth — the organic horror that defined the original 1998 poster.
Summoned magic parts. Undead bone, elemental fire/ice/storm, mythical-creature components — dragon scale, phoenix wing, troll knuckle. Pure spellcraft made physical.
Ingredients drop from defeated enemies and from mini-games scattered through the castle. Bring the ingredients to one of the three mad scientists' labs and play a lab-specific mini-game to combine them into a finished head, torso, arm, or leg. Then carry the part to the Monster Building Mode in Dr. Stein's lab — apply Monster Glue, attach it to a torso, name your creation, and save.
Each attribute is scored 0–100. Monster-enhancement formulas, found throughout the castle, permanently modify a single DTC's attributes when applied.
The complete game design document, dated 1999 and copyrighted by EMA Multimedia, Inc. Covers high concept, hooks, story, gameplay, all five game modes (Quest/Story, Local Battle, Versus, Monster Building, Local Trading, Online), DTC trading and bartering UI, Dreamcast controller layouts, security architecture for the patented memory-card system, and a $1.78M three-phase production budget. Below: the contents and the production summary.
DTC: Digital Trading Cards™ is the patented underlying technology. Patent #5,689,561 issued 1998; additional patents applied for. Copyright held by Michael A. Pace through DTC: Digital Trading Cards (1998) and assigned to EMA Multimedia, Inc. for the MonsterLab title (1999).
Origin domain: monsterlab.com, registered November 22, 1996.