In 1986 Technōs Japan developed the street beat ’em up Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun;
translating roughly to the incredible title of Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio. It was supposedly
based around the youth of developer Yoshihisa Kishimoto, named Kunio (after founder Kunio Taki)
.In the game, just like his youth, Kunio is keen to kick the gang related ass repeatedly after
his friend, Hiroshi. Thankfully for you and me, it was released as Renegade in Western regions,
and instead follows what would become a familiar story, of a guy who’s keen to destroy successive
rounds of gang members in order to rescue his captive girlfriend. But, regardless of back story,
it was a crucial point in video game evolution. This is the game which created the arena side
scrolling beat’em up genre. Without Renegade we wouldn’t have had titles like Final Fight,
Streets of Rage, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, River City Ransom or the phenomenon of Double Dragon.
Double Dragon was also developed by Technōs, with the odd nod to it’s predecessor, and forming the
immediate technological successor to Renegade, and because of that had some notable differences;
The hardware now consisted of multiple processing units, adding a 1 MHz
Hitachi 63701 8-bit microcontroller to dual 3.5MHz Hitachi 6309 CPUs.
This allowed for richer, detailed environments, with larger and more on screen sprites. However,
Double Dragon pushed the limits and would still suffer from slowdown during ‘crowded’ segments.
You could now arm yourself with weapons, from lead pipes to daggers. Useful for
taking down those hench Abobos. Significantly, a friend could now join in the
action, which not only created a incredibly fun experience, it also added to the game’s storyline.
Yes, that incredibly articulated storyline…
After receiving a swift gut punch, a woman named Marian is kidnapped by the partially
undressed Black Warriors gang. Right outside the finest pub in the land… The English Tear. Brothers
Spike & Hammer, who sound like a bad jazz duo in their Westernised incarnations, swiftly exit from
their Matin garage (and the Interceptor style car) to begin the process of kicking the crap
out of every single topless West Side punk, en-route to retrieve their hapless friend.
Whichever incarnation you look at, the story is very similar. Some, like the ZX Spectrum
version may lack the initial story element, and even the street place-names. Some forget to join
the torsos of the characters to their limbs. Some don’t bother with wanted posters, or even arcade
accurate levels. But whatever version you’re playing, you can be sure that none of them expand
out English Tear to be English Tea Rooms, like it perhaps ‘ought to be.
I grew up mostly playing the ZX Spectrum and Atari ST Versions, alongside my Brother David,
or friend Michael respectively. These versions, although far from the best, are equally, far from
the worst, and let you tackle level upon level of enemy brutes alongside your faithful brother. Who,
should really be called Billy and Jimmy Lee rather than Spike & Hammer, let’s cut that out right now.
But regardless of names, there’s a twist to this little game, but it only happens in
2-player mode. In single player mode, you go from level to level, kicking Abobo ass,
until you finally come face to face with Willy Mackey (he was there at the start too, remember?).
Kick the crap out of him and his machine gun, and your girlfriend
Marian will automatically fall from the wall, walk over, and plant you square on the lips. Hooray.
BUT, 2 player games take a rather darker twist. a twist so dark that I’m going to have to try and
account for it right here, in this video, using a series of disconnected, strewn out facts and
anecdotal evidence. Any normal person would expect that once Billy and Jimmy had fought together,
tirelessly to take out all these enemies, Marian would just be overjoyed to see them both,
Billy would shake Jimmy’s hand, and then Billy and Marian would go home,
with Jimmy, perhaps going home to his bedsit, or where-ever he lives.
But no. Once Willy is dead. You have no choice but to kill your brother. It’s one on one.
All your previous brotherly love is gone. All the side by side elbow punching teamwork
you’ve been through erased. It’s now Billy vs Jimmy until the bitter end,
and rather than being abjectly horrified by this, whichever brother triumphs,
leaving the other dead in a pool of his own blood, is embraced and kissed by Marian.
“May you live Happily Forever”………..
WHAT AFTER YOU TOSS YOUR BROTHER’S MANGLED CORPSE OFF A CLIFF.
WHAT THE SH*T.
WHAT KIND OF PSYCHOPATHS ARE LIVING HAPPILY FORVER AFTER THIS HORRORSHOW.
Was Jimmy hoping all along that Billy would be battered to death
by the thugs before the final showdown. Or was he waiting to relish in the opportunity? Maybe this
is just the cards the universe has dealt them, and they have no choice but to go along with it.
If you thought the NES version escaped, being only single player, you’re wrong. The fight between
Billy and Jimmy is baked into this version, with Jimmy acting as the final Shadow Boss. She’s then
found sleeping in Jimmy’s chambers, so whether she’s happy to see Billy or not here is anyone’s
guess. If you want a clean version, you’re best sticking to the Game Boy incarnation, honestly.
Honestly, and I know I’ve talked about this before,
and that you were already well aware of this situation. But it’s such a cold and
dark ending to a video game, that I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for over 30 years.
So where do we start looking for the reasoning behind this horrendous finale?
Well, a good place to begin, and also to establish that they don’t in fact “live happily forever”,
is the second outing; Double Dragon II: The Revenge. Mainly because Marian gets
immediately blown away by Willy’s machine gun. The PC manual tell us;
“Billy and Jimmy didn’t kill ALL the Warriors. The solitary surviving member of the gang
nursed herself back to health, and spent several years studying ancient oriental arts of healing”
So, essentially, Linda brought the old gang back to life,
and I presume Billy or Jimmy as well, because, well, neither of them are
dead, maybe the loser of the previous game was just incapacitated for a while. Although
they certainly look different in certain artwork, particularly the ZX Spectrum release.
The final boss of this new outing has echoes to the first, in that we’re fighting ourselves.
But they’re doubles of ourselves. It almost feels like there’s an underlying metaphor
at work. That we’re fighting our own rage, our own hatred. A familiar story to the first game,
but at least this time, we’re united. Once dispatched you’re presented with a photo
of the brothers and Marian, with a tear falling from her eye (I HOPE THAT’S NOT AN ENGLISH TEAR),
perhaps as a memory of what was… or perhaps as a sign of sorrow at what the brothers have turned
to. Whatever the meaning, the ‘what was’ seems more complicated the more you delve into it.
In 2013, Gravity Co. Ltd developed a kind of reboot of the second game,
with the absolutely atrocious Double Dragon II: Wander of Dragons,
released on the XBox 360 marketplace. The gameplay itself is barely worth a mention,
and the story is fairly aligned with the original, but significantly, about halfway through the game,
a tree bears a heart carving with “Jimmy Loves Marian”, but with Jimmy clearly crossed out
and Billy scrawled in its place. This is just one fragment of many which either suggests that Jimmy
was in fact involved with Marian before Billy, or perhaps the brothers are just
mentally ill and there’s a weird contest going on here. Maybe Marian is actually their carer.
In fact, Marian’s role does chop and change a lot depending on where you look;
In the Tiger board game of Double Dragon,
we actually have to rescue Marian from Jimmy’s hideout.
In some endings of some versions of Double Dragon II, Marian is brought back to life, leaving her in
the perfect position to become Princess Noiram, and the main antagonist of the NES release
for Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones. You know, the one featuring Bimmy and Jimmy.
In the excellent River City Girls, she appears as a shopkeeper in the downtown district.
In the film; Marian is a member of the “Metro Task Force” who makes Billy and
Jimmy special deputies, and isn’t referred to even once, as a romantic interest.
But it’s perhaps the limited edition Marvel Comic, written mostly by Dwayne McDuffie and
running from July to December 1991, covering 6 issues which yields the most compelling situation;
In this context, she’s called Marian Steele; although her surname changes from place to place;
and she’s Oligopolis’s “best under-cover police officer” who has penetrated the
crimelord Nightfall’s organisation. The martial arts warriors known as Double-Dragon
fight a more direct fight, but Marian passes secret information onto them
through a network of children to help aid in their battle. The comic states;
“Over time, she became very close to both of them. If she hadn’t been so
involved in her undercover assignment, things might have become complicated”
It’s pretty similar to her role in the Double Dragon cartoon series, where she plays a member
of the Metro Task Force who helps the dragons, but isn’t romantically involved.
Still, throughout the comics there is plenty of suggestion, and the brothers repeatedly get
into these strange fights with each other over who should take her hand. Harking
very much back to the original game’s ending. Marian’s response is usually something like;
“Are you guys nuts?! I’m, not some prize you for two to fight over”
Which, in a way, reinforces my original view of this scene, or how I prefer to interpret
this scene, as some kind of masculine show of entitlement. Marian is obviously
grateful for being rescued here, but she’s also absolutely terrified out of her mind,
having seen Jimmy or Billy absolutely pulverise his brother. She must be wondering what in the
world of hell is going on. Clearly she’s not going to ruffle the winner’s feathers by freaking out.
Best give him a hug and kiss, get home,
and try in some way, to honour Sensei’s request to look after this psychopathic pair.
What is clear that this part of the game is an oddity. If we take the literal story
that Marian is Billy’s girlfriend, then it’s bizarre that Jimmy chooses this moment to beat
the crap out of his brother. If we work on the basis that they’re both a little deluded and
at the height of human emotions, it makes a little more sense.
That, at least, is the only way I can cope with this tossfest
of evil, yanked straight from the devil’s colon;
But then, it’s also an incredibly unexpected part of the game.
I remember playing this originally with my good friend, and we had no idea what was going on at
this point. Our initial thoughts were that the game had crashed, and wasn’t progressing. So,
we did what most people would… just start fighting. It was only after one of us bit
the bullet, that we then realised that this was supposed to happen. This was part of the game.
Perhaps if we had taken time to interpret the title characters with their meaning of (Sou)Twin,
(Setsu)Intercepting (Ryuu)Dragons. The truth of this reality would have been more forthcoming.
And so, in reality, the only real way to make sense of this dark,
twisted, sinister horror story of death is to look from the programmers perspective;
It’s an incredibly clever and concise manner to funnel a 2 player game through the same ending
scene as a one player game, saving the programmers from not only have to program
one ending, but also saving precious
ROM, with Double Dragon already consuming a MegaByte’s worth on the original hardware.
*** and there’s certainly evidence that the developers were
trying to finish up in a hurry. There are 3 unused soundtracks in the game,
with one specifically that sounds like a a game ending track. Whether this was
intended for an alternate ending sequence is unknown, but it certainly leaves questions.
I mean, it’s a really good tune. I’m a bit upset it was missed out.
But this isn’t the only reason for an ending like this.
It’s also a clever way of creating an ultimate victor,
making kids pour money back into the machine, for a re-match… after all, the two player mode was
already ensuring it was getting twice the money of a single player cab. to start with…. going
through the entire game once again, just to pit each other off at the end, helping to make Double
Dragon one of the most successful arcade machines of its era. Hence why you’ll find the slogan
‘You’ll never have to stand in line to play Double Dragon again!’ on the back of most home ports.
This, after all, was the first co-operative game of this type,
it was an utter sensation as it was, but incorporating a one on one fighter
at the end between participants, is frankly. Well, it’s genius.
In Retro Gamer Magazine, issue 103, Kishimoto explained;
“Playing Double Dragon with a friend was like a fight between human players against a computer.
But when you reach the last stage and defeat the last boss, tough guys have to think ‘OK,
we were stronger than this machine, but now we have to know who is the best human between us’
and to know the real winner of the game, we had to make them fight each other.”
So, this ending might appear dark on first inspection. But I think it’s more of a
reflection of the developer himself. Rather than fighting in the streets, Kishimoto had
just decided to take fights to the arcade, and that meant finding out exactly who would win
among the real players, not just who could win against a computer.
It’s a strange ending, but if you scratch below the surface, and stop trying to make sense
of its context, you find it for what it is; an ending of personality, and one which not only
helped Double Dragon to achieve great success, it also helped to define a new era of fighting games.
It’s odd that the path of least resistance is often also, the best path to take.
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