Look closely at the Japanese title screen of Bare Knuckle, as Streets of Rage was called in Japan, and under Sega’s copyright line there is a second one: “MUSIC © 1991 YUZO KOSHIRO”. Unusually for the time, Koshiro’s name was on the title screens of this game and of The Revenge of Shinobi before it, so players knew who had written what Wireframe later called its “banging EDM-style soundtracks”. Around that music Sega built a scrolling fighting game for two players, made for the Mega Drive to answer a game its rival had and it did not.
Sega’s answer to Final Fight
Capcom’s Final Fight reached the Super Famicom in December 1990, without its third hero, its two-player mode or one of its levels. Atsushi Seimiya, an artist on Streets of Rage, told Retro Gamer that Sega’s game was a reply to it: “I cannot deny that it was not. Actually we bought a machine and studied it a lot as a team.” The team worked under the director Noriyoshi Ohba, who had also directed The Revenge of Shinobi. Sega Retro, a fan wiki, records that the game’s working title was DSWAT, which suggests a link to Sega’s police game Cyber Police ESWAT. Mean Machines spotted the family resemblance in 1991, saying that some of the enemies had been “blatantly blagged from the coin-op”.
The game went on sale in Japan in August 1991 and reached Britain that autumn, where Mean Machines listed it at £34.99.
Three ex-cops and a police car
A crime syndicate run by Mr X (Mr Big in the British reviews of 1991) has taken over the city, its government and its police. Three former officers take it back on foot, across eight rounds: a city street, the inner city, a beachfront, a bridge, a ship, a factory, a freight elevator and the syndicate’s headquarters. The last round ends with a corridor in which the earlier bosses come back one after another before Mr X himself.
Each hero plays differently. Mean Machines described Adam Hunter as a boxer who is slow on his feet but hits hard; Blaze Fielding, a judo expert, as “the most nippy character of the lot”, whose “blows aren’t that powerful”; and Axel Stone as “faster than Adam and just as powerful”, but a weaker jumper.
Two players work together or get in each other’s way. They can grab each other for team moves, and Computer and Video Games noted that “if you don’t get on with your teammates, you can turn the game into a grudge match”. The best-known feature is the special attack. A press of the button calls in a police car, and an officer fires at everything on screen: a bazooka in the one-player game, a spread of bombs when two are playing, according to Mean Machines. Each player has a limited stock of these calls, and extra ones can be picked up. The sequels dropped the police car.
The ending has a twist. Mr X offers to let the heroes join him, and in two-player mode a different ending appears if one player accepts. Seimiya put the game’s several endings down to Ohba’s taste for adding “a bit of spice to the script”.
What the magazines said
British reviewers were delighted. Mean Machines gave it 90% and called it “the greatest and most enjoyable beat ’em up yet seen on the Megadrive”, and its sound 94%: “Techno-dance tracks for each level, and they’re some of the best Megadrive tunes ever heard!” Rich Leadbetter’s only real complaint was that the game was too easy on its easiest setting. Computer and Video Games made it a “CVG Hit” with 93%. Frank O’Connor thought it would “have those Famicom owners wishing they’d never upgraded”, and Tim Boone wrote that “Streets of Rage knocks the competition into a cocked hat”. O’Connor also liked the “stupendous opening sequence and a great house remix of some fabulous oriental music”. Both magazines compared it with Final Fight, and in a round-up at the end of 1991 Mean Machines concluded that it “showed that Megadrive owners didn’t really need Final Fight”.
The music
Koshiro began the music at the end of 1990. In a Japanese magazine interview of 1991 he said that he often went dancing at clubs, where “the scene was moving on from eurobeat to house music”. He had first thought of writing rock songs for a fighting game, but “once I tried house music it all clicked”. Some songs had to be shortened to fit the cartridge, which he preferred to cutting the sampled sounds, and he chose the music for round 7 from three candidates. He later told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014 that this was the first time he had written with the overseas market ahead of the Japanese one in mind, because club music was reaching American audiences through MTV.
Koshiro did not write the music on a Mega Drive. He used an NEC PC-8801, the Japanese home computer he had been making music on since he was about 17, and a music language of his own. “I think the best way to get nice sounds out of an 88 was by making your own music driver,” he said in that interview, “making an editor that plays sounds how you want them”. In 1993 he explained why he still used it for Mega Drive work: it was “the speediest route for me”, and it let him reach the sound chip “with greater control and precision, beyond what MIDI allows”. The Mega Drive’s own FM chip is the YM2612.
The cartridge plays the music through a different program. According to Sega Retro, the game uses a modified version of the 68000 sound driver that Sega’s Japanese teams shared, the family fans now call SMPS (see Sound Drivers). So the tools and the driver were not the same thing: Koshiro composed in his own language on his own computer, and the finished music ran on Sega’s driver inside the game. Public sources do not explain how the music was converted from one to the other. The same wiki credits the second game’s sound driver to M.N.M Software and names the third game’s as Ancient’s own.
In 2018 the source code of MUCOM88, an MML (Music Macro Language) composing tool and driver that Koshiro wrote for the PC-8801 in 1987, was published by the OPEN MUCOM88 project under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Public sources do not say whether it is the same tool he used for Bare Knuckle.
Other versions
The game was converted to the Game Gear in 1992 and to the Master System, in Europe only, in 1993. Retro Gamer describes the Game Gear version as cut down, without Adam as a playable character; Sega Retro adds that it also lost three rounds and the police car, and that the Master System version kept most of the game but not its two-player mode. The Mega Drive game has since been re-released many times, from the Mega-CD’s Sega Classics Arcade Collection to download services.
The sequels
Streets of Rage 2 followed at the end of 1992 in America and early in 1993 in Japan and Europe. It added two heroes, Max and Skate, one built for strength and the other for speed, gave every character special moves of their own, and used bigger sprites. Koshiro wrote it with a second composer, Motohiro Kawashima. “I worked with another composer, so we were able to get a lot done,” he told the magazine Marukatsu Megadrive, and Kawashima was the club-goer who took Koshiro to new places: “he loved clubs,” Koshiro recalled.
Streets of Rage 3 came out in 1994, in Japan in March and in America that summer, with a number of changes between the Japanese and Western versions. In a 1994 interview in Hippon Super the composers said that at first Kawashima was the main one writing its music. Koshiro moved from the PC-8801 to a PC-98 and wrote “a new music generation type program” that built music from conditions instead of written-out notes, which he compared to the way techno is made now. He admitted that the result “took a bad beating from listeners at the time”.
Streets of Rage 4
The series returned 26 years later. Streets of Rage 4 was made by three studios, Dotemu, Lizardcube and Guard Crush Games, with hand-drawn characters, and came out on 30 April 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch. Wireframe gave it 86% and called it “a masterful, modern revival of a console classic”. Its reviewer, Jon Bailes, noted that its moves were based on those of Streets of Rage 2, and that the music was shared out: “Original composer Yuzo Koshiro’s opening tracks replicate the house anthems of the first game”, while Olivier Derivière wrote most of the stage themes. Kawashima wrote tracks too, and one boss, the DJ K-Washi, is a nod to him.
Sources
- Mean Machines issue 12, September 1991, pp. 80–82: Mega Drive review by Julian Rignall and Rich Leadbetter (90%, sound 94%; £34.99; the characters’ profiles; the police special in one- and two-player modes; “blatantly blagged from the coin-op”). Issue 15, December 1991, p. 116: review of the year (“didn’t really need Final Fight”).
- Computer and Video Games issue 119, October 1991, pp. 54–56: review by Frank O’Connor and Tim Boone (93%, “CVG Hit”; £34.99; the Japanese title screen with Koshiro’s copyright line; the grudge match).
- Wireframe issue 57, November 2021, pp. 86–87: Ryan Lambie on the 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog, on Koshiro’s name on the title screens of The Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage.
- Retro Gamer, “Streets of Rage”, reprinted in Retro Gamer: 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die, pp. 87 onwards: Atsushi Seimiya interview (the answer to Final Fight; Noriyoshi Ohba; the rounds and bosses; the multiple endings; the Game Gear and Master System versions; Streets of Rage 2 and 3). The same book’s entry on Streets of Rage 2: Max and Skate, the new special moves and bigger sprites.
- Mean Machines issue 5, February 1991, as cited in the Final Fight entry: what the Super Famicom version left out.
- Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima, interviews from Japanese magazines of 1991 to 1994, including Marukatsu Megadrive (1992 and 1993) and Hippon Super (1994), translated as “Streets of Rage – Composer Interview Collection”, shmuplations (web, secondary; the participants’ own words in translation). https://shmuplations.com/sormusic/
- Nick Dwyer, “Interview: Streets of Rage Composer Yuzo Koshiro”, Red Bull Music Academy Daily, 25 September 2014 (web, secondary; Koshiro’s own words): the PC-88 and his own music driver, the overseas market, Kawashima and the clubs, the PC-98 and Streets of Rage 3. https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2014/09/yuzo-koshiro-interview/
- Sega Retro, “Streets of Rage”, “Streets of Rage 2”, “Streets of Rage 3” and “Streets of Rage 4” (web, secondary): release dates; the DSWAT working title; the rounds; the sound drivers (SMPS 68000, modified; M.N.M Software; Ancient’s driver); the Game Gear and Master System versions; the Streets of Rage 4 track credits and DJ K-Washi. https://segaretro.org/Streets_of_Rage
- OPEN MUCOM88 project, “mucom88” repository, README (web, secondary): MUCOM88 as a PC-8801 MML tool and driver by Yuzo Koshiro from 1987, published from December 2018 under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://github.com/onitama/mucom88
- Wireframe issue 26, October 2019, p. 49: the three studios reviving the series. Issue 40, June 2020, pp. 92–93: Streets of Rage 4 review by Jon Bailes (86%).