1989 Main | Game List | Beat-em-ups | Magazines |

Before bringing up Konami's obvious contribution, let's look at their first punch in the street brawler genre, Crime Fighters. Besides the classic "hero saves girl (or girls) from gang" storyline, this game doesn't feel anything like Double Dragon, something that can't be said for many BEU games from 1987 to 1989. Like many of their later action arcade games, the main verison of this game allows four players to play at once. The graphics still have a bit of that look of their earlier action titles like Jail Break and Rush 'n Attack but with hints of the detail that would make Konami's later games a wonder to see in action. If you're a fan of Konami's brawlers, you'll find a few of your favorite things in here including the ability to attack fallen enemies before they get back up, knee-smashing the nethers of the bad guys (complete with the sound of a fight bell being rung) and blunt weapons knocking players and enemies into walls in the background. This is also one of the early Konami games to feature backgrounds that threaten to steal the show. More than just being something to fight in front of, these background contain advertisements that take on a life of their own, hazards that can produce cartoon-like effects if they hit you and much more detail many stages that you'll find from this time period. Unfortunately, the game is a bit rough around the edges with the timing and range of attacks and the game doesn't completely gel because of that. Such is the price of innovation and we all know that Konami's experimentation in this game paid off like crazy just a little while later. I can't find any precise release dates on this game but I remember seeing Crime Fighters in our local arcade a bit before the next game about to talk about so I still consider it to be the forerunner to the following game.

By 1989, Turtlemania had built up a full head of steam. The Murakami-Wolf cartoon was a smash hit and the Playmates toy line was selling well enough to elbow a decent amount of room in the toy aisles. Though I had read the Eastman & Laird comic first, I dug both the toys and cartoon and didn't have the nerdrage/hissy fit that some comic fans threw. That's why I can still remember the time that I walked into the Eastwood Mall and swore I heard the Ninja Turtles theme song echoing through a large hallway in the front. But where was it coming from? Was some store playing a tape to promote the toys? Man, why didn't they do that for G.I. JOE or Transformers? No, wait... it was coming from the arcade! As I walked a little faster than usual through the entrance, I was surprised by the sight of a four-player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game that was playing the real theme song. If you don't understand why that was such a shock, fire up MAME, sort the games by year and have fun finding a game that sings a recognizable theme song as something close to a show's intro plays on the giant screen of a four-player arcade game. Once you've finished doing that, please come back and tell the rest of the class about the time you found jack squat. My friend, I tell you, this was a big deal in 1989 and that was before you even put money into the machine. This proved that Konami knew better than anyone that their games needed to blow potential players minds in the middle of arcades filled with other machines trying like hell to out-beep each other. In fact, from the moment you see and hear the machine until you defeat the last enemy, you are essentially playing the cartoon. No game before it, not even Nintendo's excellent Popeye, felt 100% like the cartoon right down to the gameplay and very few games after it have come close even with the current ability to play actual cartoons on game system. The entire game is one huge mark-out moment for Turtle fans. All of this effort would have been for nothing if the game wasn't such and accessible game to play. The controls are simple but cover a wide range of options and can be easily figured out in a few moments with the only learning curve being the jumpkick methods, picking up on the attack patterns and keeping out and paying attention to the stage. It was a blast to play this game with three other people in the arcade because you rarely had to worry if the player knew how to play or if they'd accidentally beat the crap out of you and cost you a life. Just like Crime Fighters, there are little interactions with the background that can work against you and some that will help you fight the enemy in a way that the Turtles would do in the show. The game had the total package and went far beyond your usual tie-in game by being a great game in it's own right. The popularity of the Turtles led to the popularity of the game which made beat-em-ups even more popular. It's shame that few companies would put forth as much effort as Konami did and simply used licenses to trick people into wasting money to play rushed, crappy games. Fortunately, one of the few companies to match these efforts of fully utilizing a license with great, accessible playing mechanics just happens to be the other company that made a 1989 beat-em-up that helped mold the beat-em-up genre forever or else I wouldn't have been able to make this strained segue-way!

Capcom

While Konami was a well-established company with many hits under it's belt by 1989, Capcom was a successful publisher that was just starting to truly find itself. It's early days were mostly filled with a wide variety of games. Unfortunately, some of their early serious side-scrollers are infamous for difficulty that either bordered or crossed the line of being cheap and quarter-devouring. Games like Trojan were filled with great ideas but felt more like an arcade donation collection box by killing you as often as possible with little joy to be found in-between the inserted coins. Along with making more balanced ports of these games on the NES and Famicom, they were crafting new, original console games with this same sense of great game mechanics with sensible difficulty ramps. That new line of thought seems to have influenced the arcade division and led to better hits in the late 80's including 1988's Forgotten Worlds, 1989's Strider and their 1989 smash hit that helped revolutionize beat-em-ups forever.

Yoshiki Okamoto once said in a Videogames.com (thankfully Waybacked) interview that he liked the idea behind Double Dragon II more than how it played. What he, artist Akiman and the rest of the team went on to create was the next step in beat-em-ups evolutionary: Final Fight. Many companies had attempted to imitate Double Dragon since 1987, very few attempted to improve upon it's structure except for tiny changes to avoid looking like total copycats. Final Fight stripped down and rebuilt the concept from the ground up with successful results. Not only were the archetypes and character designs, including the drones, copied by many games that followed but the characters were so iconic that their basic forms are still being used in games over two decades later. The idea of using three unique characters with separate sprite sets and different attributes may not have been all-new thanks to Gauntlet, Quartet or 1989's Golden Axe but the idea that each hero had a specific, unique gameplay technique was a powerful and new idea back then. Much like Abobo (or Bolo) punching his way through a wall in Double Dragon or Strobaya powering himself up before his short fight in Strider, Final Fight has an impressive way of introducing it's major enemies before they try to cut you to ribbons, kick you in the throat or just make you explode. Damnd emerges from a door that he shatters with a single punch, Sodom is menacingly perched on a boxer's stool in a makeshift fighting ring and Rolento lobs live grenades at you while using a ladder to outpace the elevator you're riding.

Final Fight's biggest legacy is probably it's basic, simple and precise controls. Double Dragon may have a richer move set and superior double team methods but some controller motions could lead to accidental attacks that leave you wide open to being attacked yourself. Final Fight has one attack button to tap out fighting combos that finish with a knockdown move and one button lets you jump. Pressing attack during a straight vertical jump leads to a mid-air attack but pressing attack during a forward jump lead to a forward jump attack that was perfect for knocking down large clusters of bad guys. A bonus move is that holding DOWN while pressing the attack button during a jump performs a downward attack that hurts and stuns the opponent long enough to either attack or grapple the enemy. The grappling system is also rewarding since thrown enemies can hit other enemies. One major contribution was the Sure Kill Technique which allowed players to attack all nearby enemies at once at the cost of some health. Not only did these help clear out drones and break the normally unbreakable holding attacks of some big enemies, these attacks also looked really damn cool in the way that was usually reserved for video game bosses. Finally, the player could be cheap too! Final Fight may not have invented every single thing on this list, but it boiled all of these great elements into a recipe that has been blatantly and endlessly copied in the same way that many Super Mario techniques just became standards of platform gaming. Re-use of the formula wasn't always from laziness as much as it was using a great set of controls that was easy to pick up, had little-to-zero control cross conflicts in and had nearly everything you could want in a brawler. The fact that this became the default control set-up for a good beat-em-up is a testament to Okamoto's original plan.

Technos

Technos wasn't sitting around on it's butt while everyone else was cashing in on the genre they helped define a few years before. The Kunio-Kun series, which started with Nekketsu Ko-ha Kunio-kun (localized as Renegade in English-speaking countries), saw the third game in it's saga become a game that was it's own revolution in ways that have rarely been matched even since it's original release. In 1999's Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, Kunio teams with his rival and former enemy Riki to rescue Riki's girlfriend who has been kidnapped by a gang leader. The game was localized for the U.S. in 1989 by Technos itself as River City Ransom. The Japanese high-school uniforms were replaced with jeans and t-shirts and the heroes were re-named Alex and Ryan. Most of the game's basics still remain the same including the mission to rescue a girl from a gang leader. I know that's the plot of nearly every beat-em-up ever made but Technos put all the innovation where it really counts: the game itself. Each player has a set of attributes for everything from speed and stamina to punch and kick power. When the game starts, the stats are just high enough to fight off the early enemies who spout unforgettable dialogue and drop money when they're defeated. The typical 'levels with invisible boundaries' format is replaced with areas interconnected by paths, doors, stair and sides of the screen and gives a much better sense of being in a place. Some of those areas are shopping centers where you can use the money taken from your beaten enemies to buy items in the various stores. Items can do everything from regain health, improve your stats and teach you new moves. You even have the option of eating in restaurants or buying take-out food that you can eat in the midst of battle when your health is getting low. Every shop is unique in both name, inventory and charm. As you build up your hero like an RPG character, you're also tracking down info on your enemies and some must be hunted down before you can continue. With things like this, the enemy character dialogue and the surprisingly crafty enemy A.I. that made even the drones smart enough to run off and get reinforcements or grab weapons if they were getting their butts kicked, River City Ransom was impressive on every level. Think about all of the current-gen sandbox style games you've played where many of the enemies don't have the half the brains of the gangs seen in this NES cart. That's either some unique kind of mean and nasty found only in the public school system or this world just doesn't how to make a halfway decent thug anymore. You know those weapons I mentioned earlier? You can carry them from level to level without being forced to drop it. That's right. A careful player could beat all the game's bosses into submission with the same spare tire if they really cared enough. To me, River City Ransom represents a missed opportunity for the walk-and-brawl genre to level-up. No, every beat-em-up doesn't need stat-building, shop systems or even the open area gameplay but there's no good reason why Mike Haggar, Axel Stone, Billy Lee, Rick Norton and every other beat-em-up character had to keep dropping to move to the next scene when fighting on systems with far more power than the NES. In their own way, it took sandbox-style action games like Grand Theft Auto to bring back that River City feeling even if it's on the wrong side of the law. I don't know if those developers were R.C.R. fans but it wouldn't be a shock.

Honestly, River City Ransom has to be considered the ultra lord king supreme of cult classic video games. It wasn't a game that most of your friends even heard of much less played. But running into another RCR fan was like talking to a horror fan about Phantasm movies or Hip-Hop junkies who like Ultramagnetic MC's. Why? Well, most reports say that the U.S. version of the game was very hard to find. Technos wasn't a really big company in the United States so I guess the game didn't have as big of a print run as many other games. In fact, I never saw the game on a store shelf until Splitston Electronics in 2004. That's right. 2004. It was rare in this area and most of the people who played it did so by renting it. I'm pretty sure I rented it more times than I've rented any other game or movie period. I never met anyone who actually owned it until 2000 or so. It was just that great little game with a rep that spread by word of mouth and it got even bigger thanks to the internet where even the Japanese Kunio-Kun games can get love and respect on English speaking sites. The Kunio-Kun fan base continues to grow and this game is a huge part of that.

So there you have it. These weren't just some of the best examples of the genre of the year but some of the best of all time. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fight and River City Ransom/Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari each played a part in improving the beat-em-up style of gameplay in ways that we now take for granted. By coincidence, by mutual influence or by fate itself, they all just happened to be released in 1989, the greatest year in video games.

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