![]() ![]() And indeed, Double Dragon 4 is full of the same kind of evolutionary dead-ends that hurt the series back in the 90s.įirst of all, the game takes more after the NES ports than the arcade series. Remember, this is a once white-hot brand that prematurely died off because it fell behind its competition to a staggering extent. In Double Dragon‘s case, that’s not really a good thing. Most of these creators vanished into the shadows after Technos went bust, and while I doubt they stopped working in the industry entirely, you get the sense that they’re picking up not too far from where they left off. But that’s precisely what separates Double Dragon 4 from other retro revivals, and may well be why it’s so very underwhelming. On the one hand, it’s kind of amazing to get a new Double Dragon game from the original director, artist, composer, and programmer of the original games. In September of 2017 the game came to the Nintendo Switch with little fanfare, and it has now arrived on iOS with equally little warning. Double Dragon 4 (Free) was announced out of the blue in late December of 2016, with a release on PlayStation 4 and Windows coming just one month later. In the spirit of other retro throwbacks such as Mega Man 9 and New Super Mario Bros., Arc got in touch with many of the original Double Dragon team members to create a brand-new game that was decidedly old-school. Publisher Arc System Works acquired the Technos IP from Million in 2015 and got to work on reviving their most valuable brand: Kunio-kun/River City. Well, if you wait long enough, just about everything comes around again. He was sometimes brought in as a consultant, but he never got a chance to make another sequel to his own specifications. It was, however, the end of series creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto’s direct involvement with the games. Million wasn’t shy about licensing out the brands and collaborating with various third parties on new projects, so the series still popped up now and then. A successor company named Million Corp was formed by ex-Technos staff and promptly scooped up the defunct company’s IP, including both Double Dragon and the Kunio-kun/River City brands that had once held such weight. It wasn’t the end for Double Dragon, of course. Technos wouldn’t last much longer the company folded in 1996 after failing to find much success in the 16-bit era of consoles. Street Fighter 2 had released in 1991, and by and large gamers had turned their interest in co-op head-bashing into the competitive sort. The beat-em-up genre only had a couple more strong years ahead of it. ![]() Competition from the likes of Capcom’s Final Fight and SEGA’s Golden Axe had wrested the ball away from the poorly-managed Double Dragon series and the beat-em-up era of the franchise came to a close with the (again) rushed, somewhat tepid 1992 release Super Double Dragon on the Super NES. The second NES game, Double Dragon 2, was fairly popular, but by the time Double Dragon 3 hit the NES in 1991 the writing appeared to be on the wall. They rushed a couple of arcade sequels that drew increasingly little attention from players, and put together a couple of NES versions of said sequels that went in their own directions. The game’s publisher, Technos Japan, knew they had a major hit on their hands and didn’t seem to know what to do with it. In all but the technical sense, however, Double Dragon lost its relevance well before the genre it popularized did. Innumerable clones from virtually every other game publisher followed, flooding arcades and eventually the 16-bit home consoles until the coming of one-on-one fighting games pulled the market in another direction. There was a Double Dragon comic, a Double Dragon cartoon, a Double Dragon toyline, and eventually even a Double Dragon live-action movie. The game was a huge hit in the arcades, and its many home ports were tremendously popular. In many ways defined by 1986’s Renegade, the genre became a worldwide sensation with the game’s spiritual successor Double Dragon. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of those “it" genres was the beat-em-up. Eventually, the popularity of said genres give way to something new, and from there it’s a coin toss as to how relevant they remain. Every era of gaming has one or two genres that dominate. ![]()
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