Double Dragon

Double Dragon is a beat 'em up developed by Technos Japan and released in arcades in 1987, distributed in the West by Taito. Regarded as the game that defined the modern side-scrolling brawler, it follows the martial-artist brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee as they fight through the gang-ruled streets, warehouses, and hideouts of a decaying American city to rescue Marian, kidnapped by the Black Warriors gang in the game's famous opening. Building on Technos' earlier Nekketsu Koha Kunio-kun, it added the elements that became genre standard: two-player simultaneous cooperative play, belt-scrolling stages with depth of movement, weapons that could be knocked loose and picked up, from baseball bats to whips and dynamite, and a roster of recurring enemy types, including the towering Abobo. Its vision of urban America, all graffiti, chain-link fences, and leather-jacket gangs, was assembled in Japan from the imagery of Western action cinema, making it a neat companion piece to the reimported Americana thesis. A massive arcade success, it was ported to nearly everything, most famously the NES in 1988, and spawned sequels, spin-offs, a cartoon, and a film. Nearly every brawler that followed, from Final Fight to Streets of Rage, stands on its shoulders, and the Lee brothers still return in revivals decades later.