The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Action Brawlers and Beat 'Em Ups
One of the most enduring genres in arcade gaming started out in the mid-1980s with a heavy dose of inspiration from Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films.
In 1971, actor Bruce Lee changed action cinema forever in his first major role in the Hong Kong film The Big Boss (originally known in America as Fists of Fury, and not to be confused with his next movie, sometimes known as Fist of Fury or The Chinese Connection). The premise of the movie involves Lee, as Cheng Chao-an, moving to Thailand to work and getting caught up in a drug smuggling ring. When he finally wises up to what’s going on, he takes on the gang and fights his way to the top, where he finally battles Hsiao Mi, The Big Boss himself. Bruce Lee’s later, unfinished film The Game of Death follows the same progression as a martial artist clad in a yellow jumpsuit ascends a pagoda with five floors, each guarded by a master martial artist. (Since Bruce Lee died In 1973 before the movie could be finished, the more familiar 1978 release of the film, titled Game of Death, changes the storyline and setting and uses stand-ins for Bruce Lee to add in additional scenes.) And Bruce Lee’s final film, Enter the Dragon, introduced the idea of a martial arts competition where the hero first had to battle several students before his epic showdown with the evil iron-handed martial arts master Han.
These are formats familiar to anyone who’s played a beat ‘em up video game or brawler, and that’s not an accident; Bruce Lee’s films were still quite popular in Japan during the 1980s and accessible via home video, and characters modeled after him have been a staple of gaming since the beat ‘em up genre began. The idea of battling a legion of lesser enemies before taking on a boss had already become a staple of the shoot ‘em up genre thanks to games like 1980’s Samurai, Sasuke vs Commander and Phoenix, 1982’s Xevious and the 1983 hit Sinistar. But there’s no question that this progression was baked into the earliest action games centered around fighting legions of human bad guys. And there’s also no question that Hong Kong action movies had a huge influence on the origins of the genre.
In 1984, a young developer at Irem named “Piston” Takashi Nishiyama (later creator of Street Fighter and Fatal Fury) designed a game that loosely adapted the Jackie Chan film Wheels on Meals along with the basic plot of Game of Death. While the game was an action sidescroller, the game focused on using punches and kicks to knock down waves of enemies who would run at the player’s character, Thomas, from both sides of the screen. As Thomas ventured into the Devil’s Temple to save his girlfriend from the evil criminal Mr. X., he faced a unique boss at the end of each stage. This game, Spartan X (named for the Japanese title of the Jackie Chan film) was released internationally as Kung-Fu Master, and it rode the wave started by Data East’s Karate Champ for martial arts-styled action games, and since its focus was on triumphing over evil rather than winning a karate tournament, it established a new flavor of game that we today refer to as the “beat ‘em up.”
Unlike most of the categories of games featured in this book, beat ‘em ups are fairly easily identified and split into subgenres. The hallmarks of a beat ‘em up include:
Primary focus on melee combat, generally with punches, kicks or martial arts-style weapons and techniques.
Battling through waves of lesser, similar opponents before facing a tougher, more distinctive boss, often at the end of a floor or stage before progressing on to the next.
A horizontal sidescrolling or isometric belt-scrolling perspective, often depicting a street, pathway, hallway or corridor modeled after a realistic environment.
A story providing a reason for the conflict, often with a MacGuffin, global crisis or damsel in distress at the end of the game.
Non-competitive play for multiple players, though some beat ‘em ups (most famously, Double Dragon) pit the players against each other at the end of the game.
Many (but not all!) beat ‘em ups also include a health bar for the protagonist and the enemies and bosses which allows them to take multiple hits before they are defeated. Most of these beat ‘em ups also include ways in which this health bar can be restored. It is also quite common for beat ‘em ups to include weapons that can be used for a limited time, including guns, grenades and other ranged weapons as well as vehicles or mounts.
Because the category is so well-defined, there are really only a handful of types of beat ‘em ups and brawlers:
Sidescrolling beat ‘em ups, which look and sometimes act like platform or run and gun games due to the need to jump to reach different areas, but are focused on progressing through a stage to a boss. This is the original style the beat ‘em up genre, but it was also quite rarely seen outside of the 1980s. Kung-Fu Master, Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, Splatterhouse and Altered Beast are all excellent examples.
One interesting offshoot of this style of beat ‘em up is the sidescrolling smash ‘em up game typified by Rampage, which is about destroying cities as a giant monster. Since the players are much larger than the attackers, the monsters focus less on their opponents and more on taking down buildings and enemy forces. This style of game also typically lacks boss encounters.
Isometric belt-scrolling beat ‘em ups, which utilize a tilted perspective to open up the playfield and allow players to walk around within a game world rather than along a flat plane. This is the most common style of beat ‘em up even today, and Renegade, Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are all excellent examples.
Isometric arena beat ‘em ups, which utilize a smaller stage where the hero battles opponents within a confined area. This style was never popular, and only a handful of games, like Chinese Hero from the Super Chinese series or the obscure Japanese brawler Kageki, use this format.
Multilane beat ‘em ups, which allow players to hop back and forth to different horizontal lanes within a stage. These can be flat sidescrollers or isometric. This style of beat ‘em up was not really utilized until Treasure’s 1995 Saturn game Guardian Heroes and has been used sparingly since in games like Code of Princess and Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds.
As popular and foundational as Kung-Fu Master was as a beat ‘em up game, it came with some major limitations. For one thing, players were restricted to a single 2-dimensional plane which only allowed them to face one enemy from each direction at a time. The game limited attacks to a small range of punches and kicks and allowed Thomas to vanquish most foes with a single hit. Kung-Fu Master also lacked much variety in enemies, throwing clones of the same few bad guys at the player over and over and then adding in additional enemies like falling objects, killer moths, snakes or Chinese dragons. Finally, Kung-Fu Master became aggravatingly difficult as it went on because survival depended upon precisely timing attacks, ducks and jumps to avoid increasingly numerous waves of enemies from both sides of the screen.
A handful of games that came out in 1985 attempted to address some of these shortfalls by adding in extra features, like Data East’s Chan Bara, Konami’s Shao-Lin’s Road, Kaneko’s Nunchakun and Lady Master of Kung Fu, Coreland and Sega’s My Hero, Sega’s Flashgal, Seibu Kaihatsu’s Knuckle Joe and Taito’s Typhoon Gal. But none of these games could address the bigger weaknesses of Kung-Fu Master’s formula by tossing in weapons or platform jumping, and the gameplay quickly grew stale.
Fortunately, in 1986, another developer named Yoshihisa Kishimoto working at Technōs Japan came up with a better solution that was already in use for many wrestling games. Instead of presenting the action on a flat side view, the Technōs team tilted the camera to be slightly isometric, allowing the playfield to be rendered with enough depth to establish a space where players could move both horizontally and vertically without breaking the realism of the game, similar to wrestling titles like Technōs’s 1985 game Mat Mania. This also allowed enemies to do more than simply rush at the player; they could populate different areas of the screen, hanging around and waiting on their turn to get beaten down by the player. The action also moved along a belt scroll that could be pause for enemy encounters and then allow the player to proceed again when all foes were vanquished. And, best of all, the enemies didn’t go down with a single punch or kick; they could absorb a lot of blows and required focus and tenacity to defeat as other enemies snuck in from time to time for a sucker punch.
This game, titled Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (“Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio”), was inspired by some of the teenage fights Kishimoto himself had gotten into and portrayed a world where uniformed high school students formed into factions and pummeled each other (as well as biker gangs and Yakuza thugs) senseless over matters of bullying and honor. It was immediately popular in Japan and laid the foundations of an entire series of Nekkestu / Kunio-Kun games including Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari (a.k.a. River City Ransom or Street Gangs), Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball-bu (a.k.a. Super Dodge Ball), Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball-bu (a.k.a. Nintendo World Cup) and Bikkuri Nekketsu Shinkiroku! Haruka naru Kin-Medal (a.ka. Crash ‘n’ the Boys: Street Challenge).
But outside of Japan, Taito altered Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun to become a slightly different game called Renegade, and while the action was more or less the same, the setting was changed from Japan to New York and the characters were changed to resemble the protagonists from the 1979 film The Warriors. This newly localized game, Renegade, was different enough that it inspired its own series of sequels in the Western world. It also made some major changes to the original, adding in combo attacks and changing the Japanese story about protecting a high school friend into a more conventional one about rescuing a girlfriend from a coalition of criminal gangs.
But as it turned out, Yoshihisa Kishimoto and Technōs Japan were still just getting warmed up. Kishimoto’s next game, 1987’s Double Dragon, perfected the formula of Kunio-kun’s adventures and introduced a cooperative 2-player beat ‘em up where brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee were forced to fight back against a gang called the Black Warriors and their cruel leader, Willy, to retrieve Billy’s girlfriend Marian after she was kidnapped. The game world of Double Dragon felt far more expansive, including ladders and ledges where the players could climb, conveyer belts where enemies could be lured to fall into bottomless pits and objects that could be picked up and hurled at advancing enemies. Players could also pick up weapons dropped by foes and utilize a wide variety of martial arts moves (including hair-pulling!) to take on multiple opponents at once. The enemies were also nicely varied, with the bald hulking strongman known as Abobo becoming a fast favorite among franchise fans for his dramatic entrance in the game’s first stage as he punched his way through a wall to fight them.
The arcade version of Double Dragon was tremendous fun and even received an impressively faithful 1988 Sega Master System port. But the NES adaptation, published in North America by Tradewest, changed the game into a single-player experience where Billy gradually gained new techniques as he battled new foes across significantly altered stages. The game’s ending pitted Billy against Jimmy, who the adaptation made into the true secret leader of the Black Warriors. The NES adaptation also included a “Mode B” where players could battle against one another on a stage where the characters were redrawn into larger, more impressive sprites. This was the only way to play the NES version of Double Dragon with two players at once, but it provided a template for future competitive brawlers to utilize.
1988 brought a slew of arcade beat ‘em ups that attempted to improve on both the Kung-Fu Master and Renegade/Double-Dragon formulas. Games like Irem’s Vigilante (which began life as a sequel to Kung-Fu Master), Namco’s Splatterhouse, Taito’s Superman and Data East’s Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja offered new takes on the sidescroller action format while titles like Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden and Technōs Japan’s Double Dragon II: The Revenge utilized the belt scrolling isometric playfield that would soon become the genre standard. And sure enough, in 1989, Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Capcom’s Final Fight and Sega’s Golden Axe would usher in the golden era of the isometric cooperative beat ‘em up with bold graphics, impressive character designs and big ideas while on consoles, Technōs Japan’s River City Ransom would fuse the beat ‘em up style with action RPG mechanics to create a memorable game that’s still beloved today for its wonderful protagonists, amusing gangs and open world structure.
By the 1990s, Capcom invested heavily in developing more beat ‘em ups for arcades and wound up becoming the undisputed king of the genre with great games like Captain Commando, The Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, King of the Dragons, Knights of the Round, Dynasty Wars, Aliens vs. Predator, Armored Warriors, Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and Shadows Over Mystara and the wonderfully weird Battle Circuit. Konami had an impressive run with licensed games like The Simpsons Arcade Game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, X-Men, Bucky O’Hare and Asterix. Sega held its own with Spider-Man: The Video Game, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, Alien Storm and Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder. And even Data East had a hit on its hands with Captain America and The Avengers.
Capcom and Sega also had a strong focus on consoles during the 1990s, with Capcom releasing two Final Fight sequels exclusively for the Super Nintendo and Sega releasing two console-exclusive Golden Axe sequels and an incredible console-only series called Streets of Rage for the Genesis/Mega Drive. Namco used consoles to continue the Splatterhouse games, and both Superman and Spider-Man received console beat ‘em ups to adapt some of their most popular 1990s comic book stories.
But by the late 1990s, the genre’s highly repetitive mechanics started to feel stale and much of the interest in beat ‘em ups and brawlers evaporated as gamers focused more on fighting games and wrestling titles. Aside from retro-style games or licensed titles based around comic book heroes or movie characters, the genre remains fairly stagnant today. Even great recent games like Streets of Rage 4, Scott Pilgram vs. the World: The Game and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge are really just reliving the glory days of the genre, and more modern titles that have included beat ‘em up mechanics, including the Yakuza games, the Viewtiful Joe games, Dragon’s Crown and Sifu, have tossed in all sorts of additional ideas and mechanics to keep players interested.
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!