A beat ’em up is a fight you walk through. One or two players push along a street, a subway or a factory, and gangs come at them from both sides. In the 1980s arcade this was a business as well as a game: two players at once, Double Dragon’s designer Yoshihisa Kishimoto recalled, was a marketing idea, because “it also allowed game centres to potentially double their incomes”. The name has a history of its own too. To British magazines of the mid-1980s, a “beat-’em-up” was usually two karate fighters facing each other, and it took several years for the scrolling brawler to claim the word.
Fast facts
- Core idea: fight through a scrolling stage full of enemies, with a boss at the end.
- Usually named as the first: Irem’s Kung-Fu Master (1984).
- Landmarks: Renegade (1986), Double Dragon (1987), Final Fight (1989), Streets of Rage (1991).
- Players: often two at once, sometimes four.
- Close relative: the one-on-one fighting game, from Karate Champ (1984) to Street Fighter II (1991), which shared the name in Britain for years.
Kung-Fu Master
Kung-Fu Master came from Irem in 1984. Computer and Video Games described it in April 1985: the hero, Thomas, climbs a temple floor by floor to rescue his girlfriend, held on the fifth, fighting off henchmen, with each floor guarded by a master of its own. It filled arcades. Retro Gamer remembered in 2004 that an arcade without a Kung-Fu Master cabinet “probably wasn’t worth visiting”. Later writers name it as the start of the scrolling beat ’em up: Wireframe wrote in 2021 that “Irem established the genre with 1984’s Kung-Fu Master”. Computer and Video Games was more careful in 1996, calling it “THE FIRST scrolling beat ’em up (correct us if we’re wrong)”.
Its hero walked left or right along a single line. Everything the genre added later, moving up and down the screen, being surrounded, picking up a weapon, came from the games that followed.
Beat-’em-ups with one opponent
At the same time the name was being given to a different kind of game. Data East’s Karate Champ, reviewed by Electronic Games in February 1985, put a fighter in white against one in red, controlled with two joysticks and “some 24 possible maneuvers”, and scored blows “much the same as in actual karate competition” (see the Data East entry). In Britain Melbourne House’s The Way of the Exploding Fist brought the idea to home computers in 1985, followed by International Karate.
By 1987 these were what CRASH meant by the word. Its October 1987 round-up of beat-’em-ups put Exploding Fist, “the original beat-’em-up”, alongside Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Uchi Mata and Renegade. Robin Candy praised Renegade’s programmer, Mike Lamb, for escaping “the one-opponent-at-a-time format typical of this genre”.
The two branches separated after Capcom’s Street Fighter II (1991), with its eight fighters, each with different moves and strengths. Wireframe credited it with changing one-on-one fighting “forever”; games such as Mortal Kombat followed it. The fighting game became a genre of its own, and “beat ’em up” came to mean, more and more, the scrolling kind.
Renegade: the gang
Technos Japan’s Renegade (1986), Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun in Japan, let the gang surround the player. One thug grabbed the hero from behind while another punched him, and the hero could knock an enemy down and kneel on him. Fighters could also move up and down the screen as well as across it, so lining up a blow mattered. Wireframe wrote that Technos was “experimenting with more complex fighting mechanics”, and the Renegade entry tells how Lamb fitted it into a 48K Spectrum.
Double Dragon: two players and a weapon
Technos’s next game set the template. Double Dragon (1987) put two players on the screen together, as the brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee, and ran its missions into one long scrolling journey through a city, with a boss at the end of each section. Its designer, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, had noticed during Kunio-kun’s development that a knocked-down enemy’s weapon lay on the floor, and decided the player should be able to pick it up. Whips, bats, knives, oil drums and dynamite all became weapons, and Wireframe argued that almost every beat-’em-up since has had weapons to pick up. It called Double Dragon “the genre’s first blockbuster”. CRASH’s arcade reviewer called it “depraved, sick, bloodthirsty, violent — and I love it!”
The home computer versions struggled with it: ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 conversion 15%. The Double Dragon entry has the story.
Final Fight and the 16-bit years
Capcom’s Final Fight (Japan, December 1989) took the Double Dragon formula and made the sprites far larger. Players chose between three heroes who fought differently, smashed bins and crates for food and weapons, and walked in and out of the screen through a city of six areas. The Games Machine found it in British arcades in 1990 and called it “very impressive”. Its conversion to the Super Famicom in December 1990 was, Edge recalled in 1997, one of the first releases for Nintendo’s 16-bit console and “caused quite a stir”, even without its third hero, its two-player mode and one of its levels.
“Sega responded with Streets of Rage,” Edge went on. Sega’s 1991 Mega Drive game kept two players, added a police car that could be called in to clear the screen, and set it all to Yuzo Koshiro’s house-inspired music. Mean Machines gave it 90% and called it “the greatest and most enjoyable beat ’em up yet seen on the Megadrive”. In the arcades Konami’s Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, as it was called in Britain, let four players fight side by side; in December 1990 Computer and Video Games and Image Works gave one of the four-player machines away as a competition prize.
Decline
By the late 1990s the form looked worn out. Wireframe wrote that the side-scrolling brawler “was beginning to look decidedly staid by the end of the eighties”, once Double Dragon and Final Fight had shown what it could do. In December 1997 Edge reviewed Core Design’s 3D Fighting Force and wrote that “the genre more or less died with the gradual disappearance of the 16bit market”. It gave Fighting Force six out of ten, complaining that its players “simply fight group after group of enemies until they move on to the next stage”.
Revival
The form came back in the 2010s, largely through revivals of the old names. WayForward’s Double Dragon Neon came out in 2012, and Arc System Works, which bought the Technos games in 2015, followed with Double Dragon IV (2017) and River City Girls (2019). Streets of Rage 4 (2020), made by Dotemu, Lizardcube and Guard Crush Games with hand-drawn characters, returned to the series after 26 years; Wireframe gave it 86% and called it “a masterful, modern revival of a console classic”. Its designers told the magazine they wanted to fix old frustrations, such as enemies walking off the edge of the screen, without making the game feel different from the originals.
Others followed. Tribute Games’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (2022) played, Wireframe thought, like “an alternate version of the 1991 coin-op” Turtles in Time. Bitmap Bureau’s Final Vendetta (2022) moved the brawl to Britain, among red phone boxes and tube stations, and was also announced for the Neo Geo. Wireframe’s reviewer of Shredder’s Revenge noted how the genre had changed at home: “With no last-coin anxiety in the comfort of your own home, the contemporary brawler’s emphasis has naturally shifted from survival to performance.”
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 42, April 1985, p. 92: arcade column on Kung-Fu Master. Issue 174, May 1996, p. 112: Kung-Fu Master as “THE FIRST scrolling beat ’em up (correct us if we’re wrong)”. Issue 109, December 1990, p. 17: the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles four-player arcade machine as a prize.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004, p. 156: “The Usual Suspects” (Kung-Fu Master, Irem 1984; Double Dragon).
- Electronic Games, February 1985, p. 72: Bill Kunkel’s review of Karate Champ.
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, pp. 40–41: beat-’em-up round-up (The Way of the Exploding Fist as “the original beat-’em-up”; Robin Candy on Renegade). Issue 45, October 1987, p. 136: Double Dragon arcade review, as cited in the Double Dragon entry.
- Wireframe issue 50, April 2021, p. 40: “Journey to the West” (Kung-Fu Master, Renegade and Double Dragon, “the genre’s first blockbuster”; Street Fighter II). Issue 56, October 2021, p. 112: “Killer Feature: Two Crude Dudes” (Irem and Kung-Fu Master; the brawler “decidedly staid by the end of the eighties”). Issue 65, August 2022, pp. 111–113: “Killer Feature: Double Dragon” (weapons), as cited in the Double Dragon entry.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, 2012, pp. 44–49: “The Making of Double Dragon” (Kishimoto on two players, the weapons and the scrolling), as cited in the Double Dragon entry.
- ZZAP!64 issue 46, February 1989, p. 18: Double Dragon for the Commodore 64 (15%).
- The Games Machine issue 30, May 1990, p. 65: Final Fight arcade review. For Final Fight’s release, its heroes and the Super Famicom version, see the Final Fight entry and its sources.
- Mean Machines issue 12, September 1991, pp. 80–82: Streets of Rage review (90%), as cited in the Streets of Rage entry.
- Edge issue 52, December 1997, p. 65: Fighting Force review (the genre’s history; six out of ten).
- For the dates of Street Fighter II, see the Capcom entry; for Renegade, the Renegade entry; for Karate Champ, the Data East entry.
- Edge issue 249, January 2013: Double Dragon Neon, as cited in the Double Dragon entry. Arc System Works, announcement of 12 June 2015 (web), and Wikipedia, “Double Dragon” (web, secondary), as cited in the Technos Japan entry: Double Dragon IV and River City Girls.
- Wireframe issue 26, October 2019, p. 46: Jordi Asensio on Streets of Rage 4. Issue 40, June 2020, pp. 92–93: Streets of Rage 4 review (86%). Issue 47, January 2021, p. 43: “Retro revived: Streets of Rage 4” (fixing old frustrations).
- Wireframe issue 64, June 2022, p. 95: Final Vendetta review. Issue 65, August 2022, p. 94: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge review.