Man, I can still hear the wet slapping sound of Venom’s tendrils connecting with some poor corporate stooge’s face, and that was back in ’95 when I first got my hands on Separation Anxiety. You know what’s wild? This might be the only beat-em-up that made me genuinely uncomfortable while playing it, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Found my copy at a used game shop in Scottsdale – one of those places that smelled like cigarettes and broken dreams, run by a guy who looked perpetually surprised that anyone wanted to buy video games. Twenty-five bucks for a complete copy, which was steep for a high schooler making minimum wage at the movie theater, but Marvel games were scarce as hell on Genesis. Sega was always fighting for those comic book licenses while Nintendo seemed to get the good stuff automatically.
The premise hooked me immediately. No Spider-Man, no heroes showing up to save the day – just Venom and Carnage, two absolute psychopaths temporarily working together because someone’s messing with their symbiote family tree. It’s basically Streets of Rage if Streets of Rage was about alien parasites with serious anger management issues. Eddie Brock and Cletus Kasady aren’t saving the world; they’re just pointing their violence in a direction that happens to benefit humanity by accident.
What blew my mind was how the game captured that specific 90s Marvel edge without neutering it completely. When Venom grabbed some security guard and hurled him across three screens, it didn’t feel like cartoon violence. There was weight to it, malice in every animation frame. The sprites were chunky enough to have real presence – none of that fuzzy scaling you got with lazy arcade ports. Someone actually cared about making these characters move like the nightmares they were supposed to be.
The combat borrowed from Streets of Rage obviously, but with symbiote mechanics that made everything feel organic and wrong. Instead of normal punches, you’re extending alien tendrils, morphing limbs into weapons, occasionally doing things to enemies that the ESRB probably should’ve looked at more carefully. These weren’t your friendly neighborhood anything – they were barely contained monsters who happened to be mad at the right people for once.
My buddy Mike and I would play co-op for hours, usually arguing about who got to be Carnage. Mike always won because he was genuinely better at the combo system, plus he had that natural affinity for playing unhinged characters. The team-up moves were revolutionary for the time – you could grab an enemy while your partner went to town on them, or both leap simultaneously for this devastating aerial attack that cleared half the screen. We developed this whole tactical language around our favorite combinations, shouting over the Genesis trying its best to render symbiotic carnage through 16-bit audio.
Speaking of audio, whoever programmed the sound for this game understood the assignment perfectly. That Yamaha sound chip wasn’t subtle on the best of days, but every hit had this wet, organic quality that suggested something beyond normal human violence. The music was driving industrial stuff that belonged in some underground club where everyone wore leather and had strong opinions about Nine Inch Nails. It was perfect background music for controlled sociopathy.
Each character felt genuinely different too, not just palette swaps with identical movesets. Venom was your classic heavy – slower but with incredible reach and the ability to tank damage that would flatten normal humans. Carnage moved like liquid violence, all sharp angles and frenzied combos that could chain into screen-clearing devastation if you had the timing down. You weren’t picking different colored sprites; you were choosing different philosophies of mayhem.
The level design struck this perfect balance between linear progression and environmental storytelling. Corporate offices, underground labs, industrial facilities – all dripping with that Marvel paranoia where every corporation is definitely up to something sinister involving alien DNA. The backgrounds were detailed enough to suggest a larger world without becoming distracting, and the enemy variety kept things from getting stale. Security guards, lab techs, enhanced soldiers – all perfectly acceptable targets for symbiote justice.
Boss fights were genuinely memorable too, especially this massive robot encounter about halfway through that required actual strategy instead of just mashing buttons until something died. Mike and I must’ve died fifteen times on that thing before we figured out the pattern. Good times.
What impressed me most was how mature the game’s approach to the source material was. This wasn’t Spider-Man with the edges filed off – it embraced the darker aspects of symbiote mythology while still being something you could rent for the weekend without your parents freaking out. The story acknowledged that Venom and Carnage were fundamentally broken individuals whose alliance was purely circumstantial. They’re not friends; they’re just temporarily aiming their psychosis in the same direction.
The animation quality was exceptional for a Genesis game. These weren’t scaled-up arcade sprites – someone had studied how symbiotes should move, all flowing transformations and impossible biomechanics. When Venom stretched his arm to grab a distant enemy, it looked like watching liquid muscle extend across space. Carnage’s movements were more jagged, more aggressive, perfectly capturing his unhinged personality through pure kinetic energy.
Difficulty curve was spot-on too. Early levels let you get comfortable with the mechanics, but by the final third you needed to master every technique just to survive. Solo play was challenging but manageable; co-op was beautiful chaos. Mike and I had this whole system of callouts for our favorite team moves, developed over dozens of Saturday afternoon sessions that probably worried our parents.
Looking back, Separation Anxiety represents something we don’t see much anymore – the licensed adaptation that actually understood its source material well enough to expand on it meaningfully. It wasn’t just familiar characters pasted onto a generic beat-em-up framework; it was exploring what made these particular characters interesting and building gameplay around those qualities.
The game never achieved cult status like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, probably because the subject matter was too niche and the protagonists too morally questionable for mainstream success. But for those of us who discovered it, Separation Anxiety proved that comic adaptations could be more than cash grabs – they could be genuine explorations of what made these characters compelling in the first place.
I still have that original cartridge, still fire it up occasionally when I need to remember what it felt like to safely explore darker impulses through pixels and sound. It’s a strange kind of nostalgia, but gaming’s always been at its best when it lets us be things we’d never want to be in real life. Sometimes you don’t want to save the world – sometimes you just want to be the monster who happens to be fighting worse monsters.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
0 Comments