Double Dragon (Arcade)

It’s very hard to get people to agree on the first game to introduce a new genre, especially since many genres have nebulous and subjective qualities that can often be applied to games in other genres. The beat ’em up certainly suffers from this since it has some similarities to typical sidescrolling action and platforming titles, but no matter how loose your definition of one is, you can’t really say Double Dragon was the first. However, it is quite clearly the game that really helped codify what we now easily recognize as a beat ’em up. A tilted plane for the action with eight way movement, two player co-op, picking up weapons, and having to defeat on screen enemies to keep moving forward are all present here in the first Double Dragon game, and while the home ports may hold a higher place in the hearts of many, the arcade version was what kicked off a golden age of beat ’em ups.

The title Double Dragon refers to two martial artists twins, Billy and Jimmy Lee both running a dojo where they teach locals the means to defend themselves. The local gang known as the Shadow Warriors hardly want a populace who can stand up to them, so they move to get their revenge on the brothers. These details aren’t really shown well in the game, the action instead starting with the easily understood small scene of some thugs coming up to Marian, Billy’s girlfriend, punching her in the gut, and carrying her off. Billy and Jimmy head off on a rescue mission, beating up whatever members of the Shadow Warriors crop up to stop them from saving Marian.

Billy and Jimmy, sometimes referred to as Hammer and Spike in American marketing of the game, both bring the same set of skills to the table. A punch button, kick button, and jump button are all you have on the cabinet, but pressing them together or with certain directions can influence which actions you take. Your basic punch can quickly combo into a few hits on opposing enemies, but a kick can cause foes to bend over in pain, the player able to grab such enemies if they’re close enough and hurl them away for some decent damage. In two-player mode, a successful grab can hold an enemy in place while your partner whales on them, but there is partner damage so a degree of caution is required whenever the two twins are trying to fight near each other. While you can’t jump punch, a jump kick will allow you to approach enemies while also potentially damaging them, and by pressing jump and kick simultaneously, you can do a backwards jump kick to help if you’re surrounded. Jump and punch will also do something if pressed at the same time, the brothers pulling off an unassuming backwards elbow strike that might actually be their best move due to its strength and the fact that enemies rarely ever try to avoid it. It’s almost gamebreaking in its effectiveness and knowledge of its utility can almost rob the already simplistic fights of some of their challenge, but it still at least requires timing and positioning to use properly and you can still find yourself on the end of enemy attacks if it’s all you try to pull off.

The last move in the Lee brother repertoire is perhaps their worst one, the headbutt activated by pressing twice in the left or right direction quickly. It has short range, is hard to pull off without putting yourself in needless danger, and its reward is mostly just knocking a single enemy away, but the real problem with it isn’t the attack’s design but an issue with the game as a whole. For a game made in 1987, the large impressive human sprites with readable and reactive designs were certainly impressive, but it seems like Technōs Japan were pushing against the technological constraints of the time. When it’s just you and two enemies on screen or Billy and Jimmy are both working over a single thug, the game runs smoothly, but once more bad guys enter the screen or parts of the environment like an elevator or conveyor belt add something else animated to the action, things begin to chug. Slowdown is rampant in Double Dragon whether you go it alone or with a friend, the game struggling with a relatively small amount of enemies on screen and not attempting to accommodate that problem in the slightest. It can take multiple seconds for certain actions to fully complete if the screen is crowded enough, and moments like the final boss fight toss out a lot of little baddies to really make the game’s pretty simplistic action lose its appeal. The headbutt becomes easy to activate by accident as you try to move in a direction but the action’s delay in resolving leads to you pressing that direction again, and while Billy and Jimmy can pick up weapons like a bat or whip to deal heavy damage to foes, the time it takes to use these or throw things like rocks and knives can make it easy to miss or turn out to be not worth the effort.

The slow down really hurts the entire experience, but there’s not much to the design of this half hour long beat ’em up that would have made it exceptional even if it was absent. The levels you move through sometimes ask you to jump over small holes or move to higher areas, but for the most part you’ll be shuffling forward to fight the same small selection of thugs. Regular thugs have pretty similar attacks to your characters and can use the same weapons as you, and while the later versions of the basic baddies get better at defending, they still don’t require too much thought or strategy to eventually beat down. Linda, which seems to be the name of every female enemy in the game, will crack a whip to fight you and Abobo, a large muscular man who comes in different colors, serves as the large tough enemy whose durability and damage output make him threatening when he appears, but the game’s few bosses and stronger enemies are often just recolors or redesigns of these enemies, only the final boss really being a totally unique design. Sometimes there are level hazards to avoid like wall traps, but much of Double Dragon is a straightforward adventure where you easily beat up what’s in your path.

The play stagnation is technically found in many beat ’em ups due to your simple moveset and consistent goal of defeating everyone on screen to get to the next screen of baddies, but the low enemy variety and slow down really do Double Dragon dirty. It’s hard to get into the cathartic groove of easily trouncing waves of thugs when the game is dragging along and not presenting anything too fresh in regards to enemy types or alternate forms of challenge. Four stages, decently sized health bars and some extra lives, and your busted back elbow attack do mean that at least the issues with the design won’t demand too many quarters from you, dropping into pits and one of the final boss’s attacks being the only way to instantly die, and even with slow down you can usually safely avoid these fates. Ultimately, the original arcade release of Double Dragon certainly seems like more of a historical relic to be appreciated for what games came from its design rather than one that really shows the appeal of the genre it codified.

THE VERDICT: Double Dragon may have once impressed the world with its beat ’em up gameplay, but time has not been kind to it. Its enemy design is basic and fighting as Billy or Jimmy is equally simple, especially if you realize the potential of some of your attacks. However, while this could have lead to a brainless visceral brawler, the flow of the action is constantly ruined by the fact the hardware can’t handle even a mild amount of characters or items on screen. Double Dragon is constantly chugging as fights experience frequent slow down, it sometimes just as disorienting to be fighting at regular speed because the game so often crawls along at a sluggish pace. Whether or not Double Dragon turned out too basic for its own good, the slowdown is too constant and impactful to ignore, the start of the beat ’em up golden age unfortunately archaic and stilted because of it.

And so, I give Double Dragon for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. Double Dragon’s design is essentially the baseline that all beat ’em ups after built off of, but while that may make it feel antiquated and lacking for certain modern audiences, it’s really the slowdown that ensures that Double Dragon doesn’t stand the test of time. Even if the most generic brawler thrills you, dragging out the action doesn’t provide that visceral thrill or power fantasy because you are still losing the battle with the hardware’s limitations. The shockingly low threshold for the action to begin to crawl means very few moments of Double Dragon have the chance to be exciting, and while co-op definitely makes the experience more tolerable, it’s shocking it was integrated because it makes it more likely you’ll encounter these issues. I have looked past certain glitches and instances of slow down before because a game was good enough to excuse some small faults, but a thirty minute experience where most of it is struggling to achieve a decent speed means you’d actually be ignoring the majority of the game if you only focused on the fluidly running parts. The basic enemy and fight design perhaps benefits the game in that the game doesn’t turn out worse by asking for more complexity or skill to succeed, because if you were waiting seconds to pull off the move you needed in a high pressure scenario, that would make Double Dragon much more annoying to play than it already is.

I am thankful that the ideas of Double Dragon were salvaged for use in games that weren’t flawed on a technical level. It is quite possible that its home console ports turned out better since they had to reduce their graphics to work and thus did not have the same frame rate issues, but the arcade version really feels more like a prototype for genre hits like Final Fight and Streets of Rage rather than something that can hope to rub shoulders with them. Thankfully, at the time people would take what they could get, so Double Dragon and beat ’em ups as a whole could achieve future success and create some enjoyable games off the backbone they borrow from this title. Technōs Japan may have been pushing into territory it wasn’t prepared for, but its clunky little brawler at least left a positive legacy.