This Week In Retro: Double Dragon (Patreon)

April 1987: I'm seeing double! Four dragons!

by Diamond Feit

I've been thinking about a tweet from this March that did pretty good numbers regarding a modern problem with pop culture: "George Lucas took the westerns, samurai movies, and pulp serials he grew up with and made Star Wars where as the people who grew up with Star Wars just went and made More Star Wars." I am of course a fierce proponent of media preservation but there is a downside to having so much material from the past available to us in perpetuity. When everyone's favorite shows and movies still hold sway decades later, it means that nothing really ends and there are fewer opportunities to create original works.

Science-fiction is more popular than ever (according to my own non-scientific analysis) and yet most of what we see in theaters or on television are recursive iterations of established brands. I enjoyed The Mandalorian and WandaVision but I'm much less enthused about The Book of Boba Fett and Moon Knight. You won't find a bigger Star Trek fan than me yet I've all but given up on Discovery and Picard. People lost their minds over Joker a couple years ago even though it's The King of Comedy with superheroes scribbled on top. There wouldn't be a Matrix without decades of kung-fu films and anime before it (or Dark City's existing sets, just saying), but what studio would approve a movie like that today without a well-known IP attached? It's a miracle we got a fourth Matrix movie that wasn't hot garbage but even then, it was a movie about popular Warner Bros franchise The Matrix™.

This week, I'm looking back at a landmark video game on its 35th anniversary, a title born from one man's life experiences with pop culture iconography sprinkled on top. For a few years, it became the hottest property in both arcades and home consoles, spawning an immediate drove of copycats and establishing a genre that remained ubiquitous right up until it wasn't.

Double Dragon hit the streets in April of 1987, introducing players everywhere to tough-guy siblings Billy and Jimmy Lee. Both martial arts, the identical brothers live in a rough neighborhood and run afoul of the Black Warriors gang who kidnap their (collective?) girlfriend Marian. With no law to turn to, the unarmed Lees head out to pound the pavement and take down the gang all by themselves.

Gameplay in Double Dragon, befitting arcade releases of its era, is exceedingly simple. Players march from the left side of the screen to the right with three buttons (Punch, Kick, and Jump) at their disposal to beat up the bad guys. Mashing an attack button will deliver a short combination of hits, but Street Fighter this ain't. There are no hidden techniques or desperation blows in Double Dragon; the biggest damage-dealing options are weapons and rocks scattered throughout the game which players can pick up and use to their advantage.

Double Dragon is a spiritual successor to Renegade, a similar arcade game from 1986 about pummeling thugs in the streets. The action in Renegade is confined to small arenas like a subway platform or a seaside dock. Double Dragon begins outside the Lees’ crib and sees them take a journey through the city into the rural outskirts until eventually raiding the gang’s hideout. There are no off-screen transitions or scene changes; even when a level is finished, the Lee brothers walk to the next area and continue their fight.

Another fundamental difference between the two titles is how Renegade is auto-biographical according to creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto. The brand-new Technos Japan hire got into a lot of fights as a high-school student, so he took that past version of himself and created Kunio, a “hot-blooded punk" willing to bust up anybody who messed with his friends. Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun went through a necessary cosmetic change during localization, replacing the cast’s distinctly Japanese high school uniforms with a more recognizable ”street tough” fashion sense, and thus Renegade was born.

In creating Double Dragon, Kishimoto skipped the middleman and designed the world with a more global appeal from the start. It’s still a game about vigilantes brawling through the streets—a universal premise if there ever was one—but the inter-school rivalry would now be a gangland dispute. It’s not communicated in-game but Double Dragon is actually set in New York following a nuclear war. The Lee brothers are not vigilantes by choice; there are literally no higher authorities beyond their fists. As such, the game characters’ looks are borrowed from two popular post-apocalyptic series: Mad Max and Fist of the North Star, the influence of the latter being extra-apparent when looking at the original Japanese arcade flyer.

The biggest upgrade to Renegade, and the feature that came to codify what would be called the "beat-em-up" genre, is the addition of simultaneous co-op play. It's right there in the title: Double Dragon. Billy and Jimmy can fight side-by-side, taking down the Black Warriors in tandem, maneuvering their opponents into tight quarters and then slapping them from both the front and the rear. Should one player run out of lives, they can insert a coin and rejoin the action immediately, adding a hint of peer pressure to the usual "continue?" screen.

Double Dragon was not the first arcade game to let two players work together, but like Mario Bros before it, there's the potential to disrupt your partner's actions that adds a layer of tension to your brotherly alliance. It's quite easy, either by accident or on purpose, to strike each other, which in the wrong circumstances can cost the other player one life (or an entire credit). Double Dragon even weaves this feature into the narrative: Should two players make it to the end of the game and defeat Machine Gun Willy, they must face off against one another to determine whether Billy or Jimmy gets to escort Marian home—she doesn't get a vote.

Double Dragon became an immediate sensation, the sort of game that spreads via word of mouth as kids tell their all friends to seek it out. It had little to do with innovation, as I had played plenty of games with the exact same premise by 1987 (Karateka on home computers and Kung Fu on NES immediately come to mind). However, it wasn't just the addition of a second player that improved the beat-em-up formula, it was the complete package that made Double Dragon feel special. The combat is more challenging and thoughtful, as careful positioning and crowd control are essential to survival. Enemies try their hardest to surround and double team the Lee Brothers; failure to avoid their conniving will cost players a quarter for sure.

Finding weapons and making the most of these pick-ups is another crucial strategic layer, with the bonus of adding variety to Billy and Jimmy's standard array of punches and kicks. No one goes down easy in Double Dragon, so if a player manages to take out an enemy with a whip or a bat, it makes you feel like a master assassin. Even better, just as players can strike one another, it's possible to trick the Black Warriors into hitting their cohorts with a thrown weapon. A stick of dynamite doesn't take sides, it simply explodes and hurts whoever's standing closest to it.

The success of Double Dragon guaranteed versions of the game appeared on every home console and personal computer to varying degrees of fidelity. The NES version failed to include two-player co-op yet still moved millions of copies. A 1988 arcade sequel did just as well, likewise spawning ports on every platform (this time, the NES version kept the two-player action intact). A lesser third game arrived in arcades in 1990; the project had been farmed out to a third party and looked dated compared to its peers, but it still raked in significant earnings on both sides of the Pacific.

However, the bigger story was the rush by other companies to cash in on Double Dragon's popularity, creating the "beat-em-up" genre in the process. For the next five years, you couldn't walk into an arcade without seeing a line of similar machines offering players a chance to team up and take on evildoers, often in groups of four (or even more). The explosion of Street Fighter II in 1991 and the subsequent fighting game boom took the wind from the beat-em-up's sails, reducing Double Dragon from a phenomenon to a struggling has-been. A 1994 live-action Hollywood adaptation bombed at the box office, doing the brand no favors.

Double Dragon's other undoing came with the rise of licensed games that rode on the coattails of famous properties. Many of these titles would improve on the beat-em-up formula and earn the admiration of players through genuinely fun gameplay, but the writing was on the wall. What incentive did publishers have to conceive a new squad of heroes each time in the hopes of catching players' eyes when the cast of a popular cartoon show, comic book, or blockbuster movie would suffice?

Which brings us back to the opening of this column and the problems we're facing today with the endless recycling of ideas: The same trend that helped kill the beat-em-up is slowly eating away at movies, television, and even video games as a whole. Production costs are high, wages are low, and it's gotten harder to draw a crowd to a fresh story. Corporations are less willing than ever before to take the risks involved in creating and promoting a brand-new concept when it's cheaper and, profit-wise, safer to mine their back catalog for a proven brand name that's already got a following.

I'm as guilty of supporting this philosophy as the next consumer. A sequel or a remake to something I know pops up on my radar faster than a title I don't know. As a retro game fan, the current trend of repackaging classic games and porting them to modern consoles feels laser-targeted at me, a person who's more willing to buy games than actually make time to play them. I don't dare search my Steam library for the word "remastered" as the shameful number of hits would be in the double-digits. I'm also guilty of buying Double Dragon IV on Switch when the price dropped to $1 and I immediately regretted my purchase.

Realistically, there's no reason to pine for a Double Dragon renaissance more than any other game of its era. The original arcade trilogy remains available on a variety of platforms, and the not-so-recent Double Dragon Neon is a fine follow-up. There are also plenty of indie developers willing to revisit and remix the beat-em-up concept. Are people as willing to buy their no-name games as I was Double Dragon IV? Probably not, and I hate that fact.

I don't have a solution to this dilemma. I'm not in a position to greenlight multi-million dollar products, and I certainly cannot spend money as freely as my heart desires. Every Steam sale, every wishlist notification, every YouTuber who reveals "[Old Game] is back!" forces me to make a choice: Do I press the "buy now" button, or do I pass? Each time my finger hovers and I ask myself if I will click or not, my brain runs through a long list of factors that will affect my decision. Seeing a name I recognize makes a difference in that moment and I'm not the only one.

My advice to anyone with similar proclivities when contemplating a purchase is always ask yourself one question: Does this product I am considering at this very second look worthwhile, or am I just nostalgic? Only you can answer that question, and you'll always be right.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.