The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Crime Fighters
Before Konami ruled the arcades with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they released the far sillier Crime Fighters, which is like Renegade meets Final Fight on the Streets of Rage.
RELEASE DATE: 1989
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Konami
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
Arcades underwent an odd transformation in North America in the late 1980s from places that were fairly family-friendly to dark dens that felt a little seedier, in part because so many of the games being released in the latter half of the decade were tremendously (and quite graphically) violent. Technōs’s Renegade and Double Dragon both popularized the idea of beating up street gangs in urban settings, and numerous imitators tried to capture the same sort of magic. Some, like Capcom’s 1989 hit Final Fight, Sega’s classic Golden Axe and Konami’s megapopular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, were amazing, groundbreaking titles that established a template that would carry on well into the 1990s. Data East’s Bad Dudes vs. Dragoninja, SNK’s P.O.W.: Prisoners of War and Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden further popularized and developed the genre in interesting ways (even if Ninja Gaiden was actually a bit of a stinker in its arcade incarnation). Even home consoles got a great game in the classic NES game River City Ransom, another Technōs title that fused RPG mechanics with street brawls.
And then there was Konami’s Crime Fighters, a perfectly fun and graphically intriguing 4-player brawler that almost no one seems to have played because it was only released in Japan. I’m not sure why Konami held it back (beyond perhaps getting cold feet about potential censorship), because it’s a fun little game that has all the trappings of a more serious title like Double Dragon but which doesn’t seem to take itself seriously at all.
It’s also entirely in English, from the in-game text to the “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” screen to all of the background artwork. At the very beginning of the first level, your heroes walk by a billboard containing the question, “Are you covered?” with a picture of a topless woman (carefully covering her naughtier bits) and the name of an insurance company at the bottom. And then as you walk by, the sign breaks and falls on you, smushing you down into a cartoonish half-person for a moment. It’s a glorious moment that sets a rather silly game in which you’re beating up every goon in the city to track down a bunch of women who were kidnapped by a mobster.
It’s the sort of game where graffiti is everywhere even when it doesn’t make any sense for it to be present, where there are pin-up posters of scantily-clad girls who’ll occasionally shift in position, where greasers comb their hair as they walk towards you with the intention of sticking a switchblade between your ribs, where punks have outlandishly spiked hair and bosses attack you with chainsaws, Freddy Krueger gloves and spiky poles that they get winded from swinging too hard.
It's the sort of game where the final boss steps out of his limo, says, “Don’t shoot!” as he tosses the key to the cage where the girls are locked up and then treacherously reaches into his limo to grab a machine gun to spray around the street. Provided you don’t die at that moment, you can shoot him if you have a gun or beat him up. After you take him down (and with your fists, it takes a single attack to knock the gun out of his hands), he falls to the ground and begs you for mercy. You then you get treated not only to a cheesy scene where you’re surrounded by all of the girls you rescued, but also given instructions to hang on until after the credits for a special stage. It turns out it’s just a street fighting level that’s populated almost entirely by earlier bosses who clearly want some revenge.
As brawlers go, Crime Fighters doesn’t paint outside the lines of the genre too much, and while it’s goofy in places, it’s not quite silly enough to be called a parody. You have an assortment of palette-swapped blonde-haired dues in white shirts and colorful pants who punch, jump kick or throw enemies, kick them in the groin or stomp them while they’re down and equip weapons that have been tossed on the ground. The game also has one of the coolest knife animations I’ve seen in any beat ‘em up, period. If I had to compare Crime Fighters to anything, it’d actually be Sega’s 1991 far more popular Streets of Rage, and yet even that game has a serious edge that Crime Fighters really lacks. But if you enjoy that style of beat ‘em up, you’ll have a really good time with Crime Fighters.
While you can certainly rely on arcade emulation to play Crime Fighters, HAMSTER Corporation has officially released the game for the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch as part of the Arcade Archives series. There are no home ports and it has yet to be included in any compilations otherwise.
Konami released a sequel in 1991 called Vendetta which was marketed as a standalone game outside of Japan, but as Crime Fighters 2 to Japanese players. It’s a bit more serious and features characters loosely based on popular Hollywood stars like Wesley Snipes, Hulk Hogan, Jean Claude Van-Damme and Mr. T. The game is infamous for some prudish censorship that removes an enemy in bondage leather who grabs ahold of the player’s character, dry humps him and then licks him. By all means, play the Japanese version if you can so the censors don’t win.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!