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Hello ladies and gentlemen, Big Daddy Top Hat here! This week I decided to wrack my brain and consider what is probably the biggest name beat-em-up I am yet to feature on here. Then within minutes, it hit me that the title had to be River City Ransom, one of the most popular games in the genre available on the 8-bit NES.

This game, known as Street Gangs, here in Europe, is amongst the most memorable titles of the late eighties. The non-linear beat-em-up, with RPG elements, is unforgettable in both its gameplay and presentation, even offering two-player co-operative functionality – a rarity on 8-bit platforms. Whilst this is a game that many people had a lot of fun with, I doubt many people are aware of just how confusing the history and genealogy of this game actually is. River City Ransom is part of a very chronologically contrived series of games or even a series of games if any of this makes any sense yet.

Regardless of this, we are going to break the franchise down and make sense of it all today and further analyse the quality and uniqueness this quirky game brings to the table. This ladies and gentlemen is the mad story of River City Ransom and its confusing history. Yeeeeeeaaaaahhh.

To understand the history of River City Ransom, we first have to go back to a man, we have mentioned on this channel many times before - Yoshihisa Kishimoto. In 1986 on behalf of Technos Japan, he would release a revolutionary game known as Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun a title that roughly translates to "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio".

Kunio is the games star character, who features in the game as a high-school delinquent named who must stand up against a series of rival gangs frequently targeting his classmate Hiroshi. It is said that Kishimoto based the character on himself from his own high school years.

The game was innovative in that offered gameplay whereby the player could travel either right or left but also move towards or away from the background by pressing up or down, a gameplay function that Technos had applied previously with their wrestling game Mat Mania.

Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio established many beat em up genre tropes, however, the playing field was limited to a series of three-screen-wide areas and features no continuous scrolling. So, there was still some way to go.

As awesome as this little game was for Technos to find success internationally with this game, they made the decision to give it an entire graphical overhaul to make it more appealing to Western Markets. The altered version of the game known as Renegade featured a graphical style based off of the movie, The Warriors and subsequently became a smash hit across the globe.

So thus far we have one game, with two different skins but going forward things got a little more crazy. Kishimoto was proud of his game but knew he was capable of creating something even more impressive, so just one year after Kunio’s first adventure. Mr Kishimoto would release the games spiritual sequel, Double Dragon! A title that featured long scrolling stages, but more importantly two-player co-operative action. Pretty much setting the mould for the future of the entire genre.

So now we have one game featuring two skins but also a spiritual sequel Double Dragon. Interestingly going forward, there would not only be countless future Beat Em Ups that would hold the Double Dragon brand. But both Kunio Kun and Renegade would both receive entirely different sequels too.

In terms of Renegade games, futures games would be developed in Europe with Target Renegade being released in 1988. To make matters more confusing there are multiple different games that share this name. The NES version of the title is a completely different game to the one that can be found on home computer formats with the version of the game found on 8-bit micros delivering a superior experience. In fact, the Computer versions of Target Renegade are often considered classics in Europe and the game is still celebrated somewhat to this day as a result.

With Target Renegades success, home computers would also receive a Renegade 3. The game developed by Imagine Software having the subtitle the Final Chapter was a rare occasion, where the marketing was telling the truth as this was the last game to carry the Renegade name.


#DoubleDragon #RiverCityRansom #BeatEmUps

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