Most fighting games of the mid-1980s put you in front of one opponent at a time. Renegade put you on a subway platform with a gang. They surrounded you, one grabbed you from behind while another punched you in the stomach, and when you knocked one down you could kneel on him and keep punching. “Quite possibly the most visually violent computer game I’ve ever seen,” Sinclair User’s reviewer wrote in 1987. It was also one of the most popular. The Spectrum version reached number one in the Gallup chart, and CRASH’s readers kept voting for it for a year.
Fast facts
- Arcade original: Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun by Technos Japan, 1986; released outside Japan as Renegade, distributed by Taito.
- Home versions: published in 1987 by Ocean under its Imagine label, for the Spectrum (£7.95), Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC (£8.95).
- Spectrum version: programmed by Mike Lamb, graphics by Ronnie Fowles.
- Reviews: CRASH 89% (September 1987); a Sizzler in ZZAP!64 for the Commodore 64 version.
- Sequel: Target Renegade (1988), also by Lamb.
From Kunio-kun to Renegade
In Japan the hero was Kunio, a hot-blooded high-school student, and the game was the first of a long Technos series named after him. According to Wireframe, its designer, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, drew on his own troubled youth for a game about a student who keeps getting into fights with street gangs. For export the story changed. Out went Kunio standing up to local bullies; in came redrawn characters and a hero rescuing his girlfriend from city thugs. Taito America handled the arcade release outside Japan, Retro Gamer reported in 2005.
Kishimoto later said the conversion had not been worth the effort. “When we decided to export it, we had to spend a lot of time creating new characters and backgrounds, and for Technos Japan it was a very big waste of time and money,” he told Retro Gamer in 2012. When his boss, Kunio Taki, found him working on a Kunio-kun sequel, he asked for a game that would sell everywhere. That game became Double Dragon.
What Renegade added to the fighting game was freedom. Wireframe compared it with Kung-Fu Master, whose hero walked along a corridor punching whoever came at him. Renegade’s fighter could run, throw an enemy over his shoulder and kneel on him, and he and his enemies could move up and down the screen as well as across it, so that lining up a blow mattered.
Mike Lamb’s Spectrum version
Sinclair User invited Lamb to describe the conversion in its “Background Noise” column in November 1987, and his account shows how much of the work went into making the game fit.
Just getting to play the arcade machine was hard. Ocean kept one in “Arcade Alley” for reference, “but whenever I went to check things on it, somebody else was playing it”. At one point the machine was locked to stop other programmers skiving off work, and in the end Ocean made a video of the whole game so that Lamb could study it without playing.
His first decision was not to scroll the screen as the arcade game did. Scrolling would have eaten processor time, and fixed screens gave the artist, Ron Fowles, room to draw colourful backgrounds without attribute clashes. That left memory as the main problem. There were 11 different characters, each needing about 50 animation frames, and Ocean’s brief allowed the 48K version to load in two parts. Lamb disliked multi-load arcade games, because a level could take less than a minute to play and then the player would wait a minute for the next one to load. So he compressed:
- All the characters shared the same legs. The sprites were monochrome, which made this work, although Lamb admitted that the whip-wielding women “looked much better in mini-skirts and black stockings”.
- Only right-facing graphics were stored. Left-facing ones were made on the fly with a look-up table holding the mirror image of every byte, which halved the space the graphics needed.
- Sprite masks, normally stored alongside the graphics, were generated from the graphics between levels, and only for the characters the next level needed.
- Sprites were drawn with a method Jon Ritman had shown him on a visit to Ocean: build each changing area in a small window, background first and then the sprites in order of priority, and copy the window to the screen. It was slower than some methods but needed no second screen in memory.
He also changed the controls. The arcade machine had an eight-way joystick and three buttons, to hit left, hit right and jump. “That’s fine if you’ve got a joystick, but you’d need to be an octopus if you hadn’t!” On the Spectrum one fire key combined with the direction keys did the same job. The game ran on a basic 48K machine in one load, which pleased him most, because “there are still a lot of people using only a 48K Spectrum with no joystick interface”.
It was finished in time for the PCW Show in September 1987, early enough for reviewers to see it before mastering. Several said it was too easy. Lamb thought that was partly because he had played it so much, but he wrote that the version in the shops was “tougher than some reviews might suggest”.
Reviews
CRASH gave the Spectrum version 89% in its September 1987 issue. One reviewer called it “the beat-’em-up to end them all”, with up to eight opponents on the screen who “don’t all attack at once”, and warned that “breaking new ground in computer violence, Renegade may antagonise some”. Another found that after a few games “the same move being carried out over and over again” could grow boring. A month later, comparing beat-’em-ups, CRASH’s Robin Candy wrote that Lamb had managed “to escape from the one-opponent-at-a-time format typical of this genre”.
Sinclair User also noticed the gang tactics: “one may grab you and hold you whilst another repeatedly punches your stomach”. ZZAP!64’s reviewer was “amazed at how similar this is to the arcade version”, and liked that “the enemy always attack as a gang — not as individuals”.
In the charts
The Gallup chart that Sinclair User printed in December 1987 had Renegade at number one among Spectrum games. A month later it was third overall and still top of the full-price chart.
It lasted longer in CRASH‘s Hotline chart, which was compiled from readers’ votes for the games they were playing. Renegade entered at number ten in the December 1987 issue and reached number two in March 1988. It stayed there for four months, rose to number one in July 1988, and was still sixth in November, by which time Lamb’s sequel, Target Renegade, had taken the top place.
Sequel and later history
Target Renegade followed in 1988, programmed by Lamb with graphics by Dawn Drake, and CRASH gave it 90%. Technos took its next brawler elsewhere: in March 1988 CRASH reported that Melbourne House, a Mastertronic label, had signed exclusive home-computer rights to all Technos arcade games, beginning with Double Dragon. Retro Gamer recorded an NES version of Renegade in 1988.
In Japan the Kunio-kun series went on for years, with River City Ransom among its best-known games abroad. Technos Japan closed in 1997, Retro Gamer reported, and Million Corporation acquired the rights to its games.
Renegade the game has no connection with Renegade, the publishing label the Bitmap Brothers set up in 1990.
Sources
- CRASH issue 44, September 1987, pp. 34–35: Spectrum review (Ocean, £7.95, author Mike Lamb, 89%).
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, p. 41: beat-’em-up round-up (Robin Candy on Lamb and the eight opponents).
- Sinclair User issue 67, October 1987: Spectrum review (label Ocean; Mike Lamb and Ronnie Fowles; £7.95).
- Sinclair User issue 68, November 1987: “Background Noise: Renegade” by Mike Lamb.
- Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987, and issue 70, January 1988: charts compiled by Gallup for Sinclair User.
- ZZAP!64 issue 31, November 1987, pp. 10–11: Commodore 64 review. Issue 32, December 1987: chart listing the Spectrum (£7.95), Commodore 64 and Amstrad (£8.95) versions. Christmas Special 1987: readers’ letters on its Sizzler award.
- CRASH Hotline Top 20, issues 47 (December 1987) to 58 (November 1988).
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988: news of Melbourne House’s rights to Technos arcade games.
- CRASH issue 52, May 1988: Target Renegade review. Christmas Special 1988: profile of Mike Lamb (Target Renegade, 90%). Issue 64, May 1989: readers’ letter crediting Dawn Drake.
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005: Technos company profile by John Anderson.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, 2012: “The Making of Double Dragon” (Yoshihisa Kishimoto on exporting Kunio-kun).
- Wireframe issue 65, August 2022: “Killer Feature: Double Dragon” (Renegade compared with Kung-Fu Master; Kishimoto’s youth).