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The beat-'em-up (or walk-and-punch) game was definitely one of the most popular video game designs of the '80s and early to mid '90s. Though it's now a relative zero factor, the genre did much to set the tone for many of today's games. Elements of these comparatively primitive games often turn up in the most unlikely of places, including action games, fighting games, and even some adventure games.
Kicks.... |
Double Dragon is the undisputable sire of the beat-'em-up genre, and it was a phenomenal success for Taito, the company that was lucky enough to nab licensing rights to the game. However, it wasn't the first game to focus on the walk-and-punch gameplay style: Games like Irem's Kung Fu Master and Technos' own Renegade featured that type of gameplay up to four years prior. But Double Dragon did cast the mold that the beat-'em-up genre would continue to follow until its eventual death, arguably because of the advent of the fighting genre. More than any other game, Double Dragon did much to establish the genre's formula and to influence the way it has continued to evolve the canned "kidnapped girlfriend" setup, the endless hordes of thugs, the mighty end-level bosses, the weapon pickups, and the cooperative play. There's obviously something about this formula that just speaks to Americans, and the horde of similar games that were released in the years that followed served as further testament of their appeal.
...and elbows. |
The list of games that rode Double Dragon's wave is pretty long. Most notable, of course, is Capcom's Final Fight, the CPS-1 powered beat-'em-up starring street ninja Guy and his friends Metro City Mayor Mike Haggar and street fighter Cody. Largely recognized by fans of beat-'em-ups to represent the summation of the genre, Final Fight boasted gigantic, ultradetailed character sprites, a genuinely engaging fighting system, and an amusing diversity of characters. Regardless of all this, the game didn't stray too far from the formula established by Double Dragon: The trio of fighters had to fight its way through the ranks of the Mad Gear Gang to rescue Jessica, Cody's girlfriend and Haggar's daughter. Guy, it is assumed, just hung around because he liked to fight.
In the early to mid '90s, a host of other games surfaced that made good use of the aforementioned formula. Many of Konami's arcade games--such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time and The Simpsons--adhered pretty heavily to it, though they perhaps put a bit more of an emphasis on jumping and air attacks. Capcom also later released several CPS II-based arcade games that extrapolated the conventions of the genre, adding upgradable weapons, magical spells, and superdetailed graphics to the otherwise unchanged formula--1994's Aliens Vs. Predator, and 1993's Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom being notable examples. More recently, RPG giant SquareSoft revisited the genre, with The Bouncer for the PS2. Canny players certainly noticed that under the game's staggering production values and psuedo-RPG elements lies essentially a fairly standard beat-'em-up formula--right down to the maiden-in-distress story hook.
In any case, the public apparently lost interest in the perpetual gang-fights that were classic beat-'em-ups, when an altogether more compelling concept was born in the mid '90s: the fighting game. Ironically enough, an upgraded version of the same hardware set that powered Final Fight--the beat-'em-up genre's figurehead--allowed Capcom's designers to realize Street Fighter II, the very game that served as the first tangible piece of evidence that the video game audience had, indeed, found a more suitable outlet for aggression.
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