Double Dragon began as a sequel nobody outside Japan would have understood. Yoshihisa Kishimoto was working on a second Kunio-kun game, the Japanese series that the West knew as Renegade, when his boss asked him for something that would sell everywhere. He kept the idea of a game for two players and made the players brothers, named in honour of Bruce Lee, “little dragon”. The result sent Billy and Jimmy Lee through a crumbling city after the gang that had punched Billy’s girlfriend, Marian, in the stomach and carried her off. They could pick up the whips, bats and knives their enemies dropped, and if both reached the end together, they had to fight each other for her. CRASH’s arcade reviewer in 1987 called it “depraved, sick, bloodthirsty, violent — and I love it!”
Fast facts
- Developer: Technos Japan; designed and directed by Yoshihisa Kishimoto.
- Arcade release: 1987; distributed outside Japan by Taito America, and often called “Taito’s Double Dragon” in the British press.
- Players: one or two at once, as Billy and Jimmy Lee.
- Home versions: the NES (Tradewest in America), the Master System (Sega), and in Britain the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga, published by Melbourne House and converted by Binary Design; later the Atari 2600, Game Boy, Mega Drive and Lynx.
- Sequels: Double Dragon II: The Revenge (1988), Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (1990), Super Double Dragon and more, into the 2020s.
From Kunio-kun 2 to Double Dragon
Kishimoto told Retro Gamer in 2012 why the sequel changed. Kunio-kun had been made for Japan, and redrawing it for export had been “a very big waste of time and money” for Technos. “So after Renegade, when my boss, Kunio Taki, saw I was working on Kunio-kun 2, he told me he wanted me to create a game that would be accepted worldwide.” Two players at once had been an idea from the marketing department: “It’s fun to play together… and it also allowed game centres to potentially double their incomes.”
For a new direction he went back to the film Enter the Dragon. “Because the concept of Kunio-kun 2 was a two-player game, I decided to create the ‘Lee brothers’ and call my game Double Dragon.” The gang, the Black Warriors, was led by Willy, who carried a machine gun, and included the whip-carrying Linda, the henchmen Williams and Roper, and the giant Abobo. Kishimoto hid a joke in the first screen: the red car in the garage came from Road Blaster, the laserdisc game he had directed at Data East before joining Technos.
Picking up weapons began as an accident. At the end of Kunio-kun’s development Kishimoto noticed that a knocked-down enemy’s weapon lay on the floor next to him. “One day I just said to myself: ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if the player could take that weapon and use it against the enemies?’” It was too late to add to Kunio-kun, so it went into the sequel. Whips, bats, knives, oil drums, crates and sticks of dynamite all became things to throw or swing, and Wireframe argued that almost every beat-’em-up since has had weapons to pick up.
One long street
Renegade’s fights took place on screens that barely scrolled. Double Dragon ran its four missions together into one journey, through the streets, a factory, woods and the gang’s hideout, with a boss at the end of each section, ladders to climb and conveyor belts to fall into. Kishimoto described it as “the first beat-’em-up with real multi-screen-length scrolling”, and said deciding how to scroll was one of the hardest problems. With free scrolling a player could simply walk to the end, so enemies appeared at scripted points, and a player who refused to fight would drag too many sprites along behind him: “it will make the game freeze.”
The game was too big for its hardware, Kishimoto admitted, which is why it slowed down when the screen was busy. Getting it working took time: “there were about a dozen Double Dragon versions. The first one was full of bugs. It took our programmer about one year and more than ten new updates before we could get to a completely debugged version!”
The arcade reviewers did not mind. CRASH‘s coin-op pages in October 1987 singled out the two-player option and the moves, “elbow-in-the-eye and knee-in-the-groin”, and found that most of the backgrounds were interactive: “You can climb walls, throw rocks or even shove the bad guys down the odd pothole.” More than a year later it was still top of the coin-op chart that ZZAP!64 compiled from its readers’ votes, in January and February 1989.
Home versions in Britain
In March 1988 CRASH reported that Melbourne House, then Mastertronic’s full-price label, had signed exclusive worldwide home-computer rights to all Technos arcade games, and that Double Dragon, “the most-played arcade game of 1987”, would be the first. The conversions went to Binary Design. Sinclair User visited in August 1988 and found David Leitch writing the Spectrum version on a Tatung Einstein and porting it down, since both machines had Z80 processors. He expected up to seven loads and was saving memory as Renegade had, by giving every character the same trousers.
The reviews were poor. CRASH gave the £9.99 Spectrum version 64% in February 1989: the levels came in seven loads, the fighters moved “fairly jerkily”, and the game was “far too easy. When you’ve completed it — on about the second attempt — you’re unlikely to return to it.” One reviewer ended, “Must try harder, Binary Design.” ZZAP!64 was harsher about the Commodore 64 version (£9.99 cassette, £14.99 disk), giving it 15% and calling it “one of the most disappointing arcade conversions ever”, with “tiny, poorly coloured sprites that glitch badly” and a slow multiload. The £19.99 Amiga version did better with the same magazine a month later, at 62%.
Nintendo, Sega and later versions
The NES version was the only port Kishimoto worked on, and it was a different game. It came out on the Famicom in Japan early in 1988; Computer and Video Games reviewed an import that May and found “some very tasty graphics” despite some flicker. The two-player mode was gone, replaced by turns, and Billy learned new moves as he went, a levelling system Retro Gamer described. A separate one-on-one fighting mode let players fight as Billy or as the enemy characters, but not as Jimmy. In America it was published by Tradewest, a start-up publisher from Texas that had taken the NES licence. Greg Rice of American Technos later recalled royalty cheques from Tradewest of $500,000 or $750,000 at a time.
Sega released its own Master System version in 1988; Your Sinclair offered a Sega console with the “brand new Double Dragon cartridge” as a competition prize that October. Later versions reached machines from the Atari 2600 to the Game Boy, Mega Drive and Atari Lynx.
Sequels, cartoon and film
Double Dragon II: The Revenge followed in the arcades in 1988, with Kishimoto again directing. It opened with the gang shooting Marian dead, and brought back Renegade’s left and right attack buttons. Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (1990) added a third player and shops selling moves, but fans liked it less, and it came out a few months after Capcom’s Final Fight (Japan, December 1989). Many, Retro Gamer wrote, see it as the point at which Technos “was forced to hand over its beat-’em-up crown”. Tradewest published Super Double Dragon for the Super NES, and Rare crossed the brothers over with its own heroes in Battletoads & Double Dragon.
The name spread well beyond games: T-shirts, a board game, a Marvel comic, an animated television series that ran from 1993 to 1995, action figures and a live-action film in 1994 starring Scott Wolf and Mark Dacascos as the Lee brothers. Retro Gamer called the film “a poor and rightly mocked adaptation”.
Technos made a new Double Dragon for the Neo Geo in 1995, shortly before it went bankrupt. The rights passed to Million, which licensed Double Dragon Advance for the Game Boy Advance, and WayForward’s Double Dragon Neon followed in 2012. Arc System Works bought the Technos games in 2015, and under its ownership came Double Dragon IV (2017), Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons (2023) and Double Dragon Revive (2025).
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 103, 2012, pp. 44–49: “The Making of Double Dragon” (Kishimoto on Kunio-kun 2, Bruce Lee, the weapons, the scrolling, the slowdown and the debugging; the Black Warriors; the NES version; Double Dragon II and 3; the merchandise, cartoon and film).
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, pp. 68–73: Technos company profile (Taito America’s arcade distribution; Tradewest’s NES licence and Greg Rice on the royalties; Super Double Dragon published by Tradewest; the Neo Geo version).
- Retro Gamer issue 108, 2012: “The Making of Renegade” (Kishimoto’s laserdisc games at Data East).
- Wireframe issue 65, August 2022, pp. 111–113: “Killer Feature: Double Dragon” (weapons in later beat-’em-ups).
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, p. 136: arcade review.
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 8: “Melbourne’s Coin-op Coup”.
- Sinclair User issue 77, August 1988: preview of the Spectrum conversion at Binary Design (David Leitch; Tatung Einstein; seven loads).
- The Games Machine issue 11, October 1988: competition feature (conversions by Binary Design).
- CRASH issue 56, September 1988: preview (David Leitch of Binary Design programming the Spectrum version for Melbourne House).
- Your Sinclair issue 34, October 1988: cover feature and competition (a Sega console and Double Dragon cartridge).
- CRASH issue 61, February 1989, pp. 65–66: Spectrum review (Melbourne House, £9.99, author Binary Design, 64%).
- ZZAP!64 issue 46, February 1989, p. 18: Commodore 64 review (£9.99 cassette, £14.99 disk, 15%); readers’ coin-op chart (also issue 45, January 1989). Issue 47, March 1989: Amiga review (£19.99, 62%).
- Computer and Video Games issue 79, May 1988: review of the Japanese Famicom version by Tony Takoushi.
- Edge issue 249, January 2013: WayForward’s Double Dragon Neon (September 2012).
- Wikipedia, “Double Dragon (video game)” (web, secondary): arcade release month; Master System by Sega in 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dragon_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Double Dragon” (web, secondary): the cartoon’s run (1993–1995), Double Dragon IV, Gaiden and Revive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dragon
- Arc System Works, announcement of 12 June 2015 (web): purchase of the Technos Japan rights from Million. https://www.arcsystemworks.com/arc-system-works-acquires-property-rights-of-double-dragon-super-dodge-ball-kunio-kun-series-from-million-co-ltd/