Double Dragon – “Hit P2 fire”

Renegade, the pioneering Yoshihisa Kishimoto-directed beat-’em-up, became a hit in the West, which was pleasing to its developers Technos. The problem was what they had done to achieve that — changing all the graphics in the game to strip away the trappings of its origins as 熱血硬派くにおくん, a game about hot-blooded Kunio-kun fighting gangs of fellow school students. 

As Kishimoto later explained to Retro Gamer, “when we decided to export it, we had to spend a lot of time creating new characters and backgrounds, and for Technos Japan it was a very big waste of time and money.” When Kishimoto started thinking about a direct beat-’em-up sequel, his boss told him “he wanted me to create a game that would be accepted worldwide. So the concept of the initial Kunio-Kun 2 became Double Dragon.”

Rather than Kishimoto’s school days, for Double Dragon he took inspiration from Hong Kong cinema. As a source that was both more internationally recognisable and an obvious fit for the beat-’em-up genre, which had arguably started with an adaptation of a Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan movie, in the shape of Spartan-X/Kung-Fu Master. Kishimoto was a long time fan of Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon, an inspiration which explains both the title Double Dragon and giving its main characters the surname Lee.

He also incorporated the suggestion of Technos’s marketing department to make it two-player, to make more money quicker, and built the two-player approach right into the fighting. Enemies hold you long enough for the other player to step in and rescue you. Or you can go straight to attacking each other instead, something you are forced to do as a twist climax if you ever complete the game. As well as that, Kishimoto’s team added a new approach to scrolling, used fewer but more interesting enemies, made the entire game a single left-right passage punctuated by boss fights, and let you pick up and use enemies’ weapons. Kishimoto thought of that last one when seeing weapons placed temptingly on the floor as part of enemies’ knocked-down positioning in Renegade.

Kishimoto said Double Dragon was the work he was most proud of and it’s easy to see why. It turned out brilliantly and became a worldwide hit on its release in 1987. In the UK, Ferdy Hamilton reviewed the arcade machine for Commodore User, and wrote that “the graphics are superb, the handling likewise and the varieties of actions, locations and enemies make this a truly state of the art Beat ‘Em Up, centuries beyond those old Kung Fu games which still litter the arcades.” He wrote admiringly that “this isn’t an easy game to play initially — you have to use both brains and brawn” before adding that “it’s also not going to be an easy game to play for another reason — it took me about half an hour to get near it in my local arcade”.

Building on the genre so effectively and adding superbly executed two-player action helped Double Dragon to become iconic. “I don’t know if people will play Double Dragon in 100 years” Kishimoto once said; decades on from its release it’s still well-remembered. In 2021, Australia’s Ludo Studio, makers of world-conquering children’s cartoon Bluey, set most of an episode in the 1980s, targeting the parents in the audience even more directly than usual. At one point, the episode’s two bickering pre-teen brothers play an arcade game together. There was really only one choice for what game it should be based on.

The story of what happened with the home computer version of Double Dragon also has an Australian link, because it was released by Melbourne House. The Melbourne House that released Double Dragon in 1988, though, shared little more than a name with the Melbourne-based Melbourne House who had released The Way of the Exploding Fist in 1985. The association with a fighting game classic was doubtless helpful, but any real link with the creators had gone since Melbourne House had been separated from its development arm and sold off in early 1987. British budget games publisher Mastertronic had bought the publishing arm and the name, reportedly for £1 million, and decided to use it to give a bit of branding weight to their move into full-price games.

Crash reported on the deal for Double Dragon, saying that “the ‘most-played arcade game of 1987’ will be Melbourne House’s first release under a massive new coin-op licensing deal” for “exclusive worldwide home-computer rights to all Technos arcade games”. With the arcade Double Dragon having been published in the West by Taito, Sinclair User suggested that Mastertronic’s deal with a Japanese developer rather than publisher was a first and would “[cut] out the ‘middle men’”. With no developer to go with the Melbourne House name, Mastertronic commissioned Binary Design to work on Double Dragon.

The ZX Spectrum version was chiefly the work of David Leitch. In a 1988 Crash roundup of developers’ favourites, he named Binary Design predecessor John Pickford as his most admired programmer and chose as his three favourite games Ant Attack, Match Day II and Jetpac. None of those pointed towards an affinity with beat-’em-ups, and indeed he had barely played Double Dragon before converting it. Speaking to Retro Gamer in 2010, he recalled the challenges of the task: “it was a big game for the time, and the coin-op’s hardware was much better than the Spectrum’s. Plus I was still learning my trade and figuring out how to do lots of things“

Without any code provided, he was reliant on playing the arcade game (set to infinite credits) and trying to match the “look and feel” of it. He spent longer than he would have liked on getting two-player to work; “I thought we had to do that; otherwise it wouldn’t have been Double Dragon.” Unfortunately, the time it took to get the game working at all took away from time to actually make it any good. Computer & Video Games ran a preview saying that “Double Dragon is an ideal home computer game, although the pre-production [versions] we’ve already seen are a little disappointing. Hopefully the finished versions will be a lot better.” They were not.

Your Sinclair called the Spectrum Double Dragon “a generally competent beat ‘em-up”, though even they said that “the fun doesn’t really start until you get one of your chums to come round”. Other Spectrum reviews were much worse. Chris Jenkins in Sinclair User ended his first sentence with “it wasn’t worth the wait” and proceeded to a list of complaints about the graphics: “the characters clash with the background to such an extent that half the time you’re fighting people with green heads and yellow trousers”; “the perspective is off in several places”; “the sprites are rotten”. 

Jenkins also highlighted that waiting for Christmas had meant Melbourne House had been beaten to the jump: “Target: Renegade, especially, is very much like Double Dragon, but the Spectrum conversion was so much better that there’s no real comparison”. That was a bit unfair in that Target: Renegade was not an arcade conversion at all but Ocean’s own made-for-Spectrum take on Double Dragon with none of the constraints of trying to match it exactly. The unflattering comparison remained, though. It was one that Crash also picked up on. “Gameplay is very much like Target: Renegade but much easier” they wrote, before concluding with “yawn, another mediocre beat ‘em up”. Looking back, David Leitch thought that “it got the reviews it deserved”.

The Spectrum version was still an absolute triumph in comparison to the other home computer versions. Leitch’s Amstrad version appears to have missed its 1988 deadline entirely, as it goes unmentioned in any chart listing for the game at the time. It was pilloried when it did come out. Richard Aplin later wrote of the 16-bit versions he helped program (which did make it out before Christmas, if weeks after the Spectrum version) “I patched it together in a rush for Christmas after the original programmers screwed it up royally — yes the Amiga version was a straight port of the ST version, and yes, most definitely, they both sucked.” And then there was the Commodore 64 version.

Nick Speakman, who was 18 years old at the time and a project manager at Binary Design, remembered a version of the game being scrapped and started over from scratch. Instead of the usual three months for making a game around this time, the team ultimately responsible for the Commodore 64 version had just a few weeks. They reportedly didn’t want their names associated with the end results; the title screen just says “converted by Binary Design”. Moreover, they took the unusual move of pre-emptively providing their excuses in the Commodore 64 section of the game’s instructions.

In what New Computer Express referred to as “a snivelling apology”, there is a note from ‘The Programmers’ addressed “Dear Games Player”. It mostly concerns similar issues as faced in making the Spectrum version, but resolved more awkwardly. “We knew how disappointed you would be if the game didn’t have the same two-player mode as the Arcade game you know and love. So we came up with a memory-saving solution. We implemented sprite stacking techniques to create the animated characters (using two smaller sprites instead of one larger one to create each figure). The resulting small gap you may notice in the characters at waist level, is the compromise that the architecture of the C64 forced us to make. This should not impair your enjoyment of the game in any way.”

Reviewers of the Commodore 64 version had a different opinion as to whether the game’s graphical defects impaired their enjoyment in any way. Mike Pattenden referred to that waist gap sarcastically in Commodore User: “I mean it’s only a minor detail if the main character looks like an extra from Rent A Ghost”. His complaints with the “very average” gameplay and “agonising” multi-load were stronger still, and he suggested of the game’s difficulty that it was “confusing exhaustive boredom with addictive toughness”. Gordon Houghton wrote in Zzap! that “nobody’s expecting the 64 version to be exactly like the coin-op (that would be stupid) — just a fair representation. With such primitive graphics, basic sound and a really tedious multiload, Melbourne House definitely haven’t managed that”. “It’s a real pity”, wrote Matthew Evans, “that the 64 conversion is absolutely pathetic.”

Double Dragon hit #1 in the UK full price combined formats chart, but only for one week before falling. It went down as an infamous disaster, which is certainly one way of looking at it. On the other hand, when Mastertronic reissued it as a budget game in 1991 it went to #1 in the budget charts, and Mastertronic Collectors’ Archive report that, across both releases, Mastertronic sold 334,000 copies of Double Dragon. That makes it their fourth best selling game ever. In the late ‘80s, as I’ve often seen, home computer conversions of a sufficiently popular arcade game could sell no matter how bad and badly received they were. Double Dragon came pretty close to testing that to destruction, but it didn’t knock it down.

---

---

---

Sources:

• The Making of Double Dragon, Stuart Hunt, Retro Gamer No. 103, May 2012
• The man who created Double Dragon, Matt Leone, Polygon, 2012
• Interview with Yoshihisa Kishimoto, creator of Double Dragon, Mac4Ever on YouTube, 2013 [in French]
• Arcades – Double Dragon, Ferdy Hamilton, Commodore User No. 47, August 1987, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• ‘Double Dragon’ Creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto Interview: A Retro Classic Returns, Huffington Post, 2014
• News – Melbourne’s coin-op coup, Crash No. 50, March 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Mastertronic does the double, Sinclair User No. 71, February 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Programmers on programmers, Crash No. 59, December 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Coin-op capers: Double Dragon, Retro Gamer No. 74, March 2010
• Double Dragon, C&VG Christmas Crackers, December 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Double Dragon, Your Sinclair No. 38, February 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Games review – Double Dragon, Chris Jenkins, Sinclair User No. 82, January 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – Double Dragon, Crash No. 61, February 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• The Mystery of the two Amstrad CPC versions of Double Dragon, Steve Halfpenny, Double Dragon Dojo, 2003
• Interview with Nick Speakman, Steve Halfpenny, Double Dragon Dojo, 2010
• Double Dragon V1, Frank Gasking, Games That Weren’t 64, 2015/2022
• Entertainment reviews – Double Dragon, Rik Haynes, New Computer Express No. 4, 03 December 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• 64 Screen Scene – Double Dragon, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 52, January 1989, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Zzap! Test – Double Dragon, Zzap! No. 46, February 1989, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Mastertronic Best Sellers, Anthony Guter, Mastertronic Collectors’ Archive, 2023

---