Stampede

A stampede is uncontrolled concerted running as an act of mass impulse among herd animals or a crowd of people in which the herd (or crowd) collectively begins running, often in an attempt to escape a perceived threat.

Species associated with stampede behavior include cattle, elephants, blue wildebeests, walruses, wild horses, rhinoceros, and humans.

Cattle stampedes

Anything unusual may start a stampede among cattle. Especially at night, things such as lighting a match, someone jumping off a horse, a horse shaking itself, a lightning strike, a tumbleweed blown into the herd, or "a horse running through a herd kicking at a saddle which has turned under its belly" have been known to cause stampedes.

A large stampede typically eliminates everything in its path. With livestock, cowboys attempt to turn the moving herd into itself, so that it runs in circles rather than running off a cliff or into a river and avoids damaging human life or property. Tactics used to make the herd turn into itself include firing a pistol, which creates noise to make the leaders of the stampede turn.

Stampede (video game)

Stampede is a video game cartridge which was released in 1981 for the Atari 2600 video game console, and the Intellivision video game console in 1982. The game is a left-to-right side-scroller with an overhead, third-person view. It was published by Activision.

Gameplay

An Activision catalog from 1982 advertised Stampede in the following way:

The objective of Stampede is to round up all of the cattle you encounter. To do so, the player must lasso each one in order to capture it. The player is initially only allowed to let two cattle pass; if a third one slips by, the game is over.

An important caveat to this is that the player gets one extra free pass for every 1,000 points scored. So, if a player were at 2,000 points and had not yet let any cattle pass, then he or she would be allowed to let four cattle pass before the fifth one ended the game (assuming he or she did not reach 3,000).

This makes it possible for an expert player to repeatedly beat the game—as after about 5,000 points or so the game essentially "resets," and the same pattern is repeated. According to David Yancey, there is a bug which makes it so that the game will typically only allow you to play in a loop for 8 play throughs; apparently, however, there is a version of the game with a different binary which allows one to continue to accrue points until the score 99,999 is reached.

Stampede (film)

Stampede is a 1949 American Western directed by Lesley Selander.

Plot

The plot revolves around two brothers: Mike McCall (Rod Cameron), and Tim McCall (Don Castle). The brothers own a large ranch in Arizona and sell some of their surplus grazing land to some settlers. When the settlers arrive they find the land bone dry because the McCall brothers have dammed the river and control all the water.

Settler John Dawson (Steve Clark) and his daughter Connie Dawson (Gale Storm) complain to the local sheriff (Johnny Mack Brown) but the sheriff claims there is nothing he can do. A love interest develops between Tim McCall and Connie Dawson, while simultaneously the settlers try to dynamite the dam and stampede the McCall cattle.

Cast