Right, let me tell you about the summer of 1991 when everything changed for me. I was twelve, spotty as anything, and had just discovered the most beautiful thing in the world: the Streets of Rage cabinet at the local arcade in Stockport. My mate Gary and I would cycle down there with whatever coins we could scrounge from our parents’ jacket pockets, ready to spend the entire afternoon punching our way through digital streets that looked infinitely more exciting than the grey Manchester suburbs we actually lived in.
See, beat ’em ups weren’t just games for us – they were proper social events. You’d queue up behind the cabinet, watching other kids play, learning their strategies, waiting for your turn to show everyone how it was really done. When Streets of Rage appeared, it was like nothing we’d seen before. The graphics were gorgeous, the music was absolutely banging, and you could play as three different characters who all felt genuinely different to control. I always went for Blaze because she was quick and had that brilliant back-kick move, whilst Gary preferred Adam because… well, Gary wasn’t the brightest lad and just mashed buttons anyway.
The thing about growing up with European gaming culture is that we experienced beat ’em ups differently than our American cousins. We didn’t have as many arcades, so when a good one showed up, it became the center of your social universe. Double Dragon had been doing the rounds for a while, but it felt clunky compared to what Sega managed with Streets of Rage. The controls were smoother, the special moves actually felt special, and the soundtrack – bloody hell, the soundtrack was incredible. Yuzo Koshiro’s music for that series is still burned into my brain thirty years later.
My younger brother Simon and I had this weird relationship where we’d fight constantly about everything – who got the last biscuit, whose turn it was on the telly, typical sibling nonsense. But put us in front of a beat ’em up and suddenly we were this unstoppable team. Got Streets of Rage 2 for the Mega Drive in 1993, and for months it was the only thing that could get us to cooperate. We developed this whole system – he’d play as Max because he liked the slow, powerful characters, and I’d stick with Blaze for speed. Perfect combination, really.
The risk-reward system in these games was brilliant, wasn’t it? That moment when you’re surrounded by enemies and you’ve got to decide whether to use your special move. Do you sacrifice some health to clear the screen, or try to fight your way out the hard way? I remember being in that exact situation in the final level of Streets of Rage 2, down to my last sliver of health, completely surrounded. Used the special move, cleared the enemies, but left myself so weak that the next hit would kill me. Simon actually gasped – proper dramatic moment, that was.
What made the genre special was how it took something completely mental and made it feel natural. Why are there perfectly good roast dinners sitting in bins? Why does smashing a phone box somehow produce a baseball bat? Why am I finding health-restoring apples inside oil drums? None of it made any sense, but it didn’t matter because the game logic was so consistent. You punch things, stuff appears, you use the stuff to punch bigger things. Simple.
The Amiga scene had some brilliant beat ’em ups that Americans missed entirely. Shadow of the Beast wasn’t quite the same thing, but it had that same satisfaction of moving right and destroying everything in your path. The European computer gaming market produced loads of games that never made it across the Atlantic, and some of them were absolutely mental in the best possible way. I remember playing this one called Ruff ‘n’ Tumble that was basically a beat ’em up with a rabbit protagonist. Completely barmy, but somehow it worked.
Final Fight on the SNES was my first proper lesson in how publishers could completely mess up a port. Missing character, missing levels, missing the entire two-player mode – what were they thinking? My mate Dave’s older brother had played the arcade original and kept going on about how much better it was. “This isn’t even the real game,” he’d say whilst we were trying to enjoy ourselves. Cheers for that, Mark. Really helpful.
The character archetypes in these games became so standardized it was almost funny. You had your big slow bloke who hit like a truck, your quick character who died if someone looked at them wrong, and your balanced middle option for people who couldn’t make decisions. Streets of Rage 2 perfected this with Max, Blaze, Axel, and Skate – though Skate was basically cheating because he could run so fast that most enemies couldn’t even hit him.
Golden Axe was the odd one out, wasn’t it? Fantasy setting, magic spells, riding those weird chicken-leg creatures… but somehow it still felt like a proper beat ’em up. The magic system was brilliant – collect little blue gnomes to power increasingly ridiculous spells. I never understood why Death Adder’s minions were carrying around magical gnomes, but I wasn’t complaining. My friend Andy always insisted on being the dwarf because the spinning axe move was completely overpowered. He wasn’t wrong.
The decline of beat ’em ups in the mid-90s was genuinely sad to watch. Everything had to be 3D suddenly, and most attempts to translate the genre didn’t work. Fighting Force looked impressive in screenshots, but playing it felt wrong somehow. The simple pleasure of moving from left to right, the clear progression through distinct stages – all of that got lost when developers tried to make everything more “cinematic.”
I’ve still got my original Mega Drive set up in the spare room, along with Streets of Rage 2, Final Fight CD, and a few others. My kids think it’s hilarious that dad gets genuinely excited about games that look like “moving cartoons,” but occasionally I can convince them to have a go. My son actually got quite into Streets of Rage 4 when it came out, which felt like some kind of generational bridge moment. Thirty years later, and the formula still works perfectly.
The modern revival has been wonderful to witness. Streets of Rage 4 understood exactly what made the originals special and didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken. When I played it for the first time with Simon – both of us now middle-aged with mortgages and responsibilities – we immediately fell back into our old patterns. “Watch the guy with the knife!” “Save your special for the boss!” “Stop walking into the enemies, you muppet!” Some things never change.
What I love about beat ’em ups is how they represent gaming at its most elemental. No complex narratives, no moral choices, no skill trees or crafting systems. Just you, your fists, and a street full of people who need punching. There’s something beautifully honest about that simplicity, something that modern gaming has largely forgotten in its rush to be everything to everyone.
Castle Crashers proved the genre could work with modern audiences, and games like River City Girls have shown there’s still room for innovation within the classic framework. The heart remains the same though – walk right, punch dudes, pick up the occasional turkey dinner from a bin, repeat until everyone’s unconscious and you can move to the next screen. Gaming perfection, really.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
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