Introduction Warriors of Fate was developed and published by Capcom for arcades, released in October 1992 under the Japanese title Tenchi wo Kurau II: Battle of Red Cliffs, making it the third Capcom game based on the Tenchi wo Kurau manga and the second actual video game adaptation, following 1989’s Dynasty Wars. Set during the…
Introduction Knights of the Round was developed and published by Capcom for its CPS-1 arcade board, released in Japan in November 1991 as part of a wave of fantasy-themed beat ’em ups the studio put out around that era, alongside titles like The King of Dragons. Loosely built around the legend of King Arthur, the…
Introduction Double Dragon is Technos Japan’s original 1987 arcade beat ’em up, created by designer Yoshihisa Kishimoto as a spiritual successor to his earlier Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun after company executives pushed for the next game to support two simultaneous players. Kishimoto drew inspiration from gritty street-gang pop culture of the era, citing the 1979 film…
Introduction Alien vs. Predator was developed and published by Capcom on its CPS-2 arcade hardware, licensed from Twentieth Century Fox and built by a team including designers Tetsuya Iijima, Toshihiko Uda, and Jun Matsumura with a score by Hideki Okugawa, releasing in Japanese arcades in May 1994 before reaching other regions shortly after. Capcom leaned…
Introduction The Punisher was developed and published by Capcom, directed by Noritaka Funamizu with designers Akira Yasuda, Jun Keiba, and Junichi Ohno, and a score by Yoko Shimomura and Isao Abe, released to Japanese arcades on the CP System Dash board in May 1993 and reaching North America that July. It marked the start of…
Introduction Captain Commando was developed and published by Capcom for arcades, produced by Yoshiki Okamoto and designed by Akira Yasuda and Junichi Ohno, released on the CP System hardware in late 1991 as the seventeenth game built for that board. The title character has an unusual origin story: Captain Commando began life years earlier as…
Introduction Mighty Final Fight was developed and published by Capcom, produced by Tokuro Fujiwara, and released in Japan in June 1993 before reaching North America that July, arriving as a spinoff of the studio’s own 1989 arcade brawler Final Fight rather than a direct port. Its most immediately obvious change is the art style: the…
Introduction River City Ransom was developed and published by Technos Japan, directed by Mitsuhiro Yoshida and Hiroyuki Sekimoto with music by Kazuo Sawa, and released in Japan in April 1989 as the first game the studio built specifically for a home console rather than adapting from arcades. It’s the third entry in the Kunio-kun series…
Introduction Battletoads was developed by Rare and published by Tradewest, designed by Tim and Chris Stamper with a soundtrack by David Wise, and built with the explicit goal of giving Rare its own answer to the era’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze. It released on the NES in North America and Japan in June 1991,…
Introduction Double Dragon began as a 1987 arcade beat ’em up developed by Technos Japan and distributed by Taito, a spiritual successor to Technos’s earlier Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun that added two-player co-op and the ability to pick up and use a disarmed enemy’s own weapon, quickly becoming one of the genre’s foundational hits. Technos ported…
Introduction Ninja Gaiden was developed and published by Tecmo for the NES, directed by Hideo Yoshizawa with art by Masato Kato, released in Japan in December 1988 and in North America the following March. It ran in parallel with an unrelated arcade beat ’em up of the same name built by a different team, sharing…
Introduction Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was developed by Konami and published in North America under its Ultra Games imprint, a label Konami founded in 1988 specifically to get around Nintendo’s limits on how many titles a single publisher could release per year. The game reached the Famicom in Japan in May 1989 and the NES…