Many people love side-scrolling beat ’em ups, and with good reason. They’re games with a good, old-fashioned appeal, and I think they’re some of the most wonderful, pure titles to have ever graced gaming. Just consider what it might have been like back in the ’80s or ’90s when you, some friends, or even just some kid, walked into a local neon-lit arcade with the glow and noise of that game humming, or maybe you heard it first—those digitized punch and kick noises the games made, or the groans unique to common foes defeated in the console versions. And there was just that thing I’m talking about that I can’t find a suitable one-word replacement for—the appeal of the pixels and the selection of those few, magical colors that the 256-color palette of the day afforded easily seen by anyone fighting your way to the console.
A quality that truly allows side-scrolling beat ’em ups to stand out is the sheer simplicity of their design. Usually, the character the player controls is moving towards the right side of the screen, and his or her progress is only impeded by lots and lots of goons. And why not? That’s a pretty large portion of what you signed up for, knowing very well that you’re not going to get a half-hour’s reprieve in the middle to do some item shopping or max out your stats. Game developers of the time knew this well, so they didn’t waste our time or their time with any unnecessary nonsense.
What made the side-scrolling beat ’em ups so enjoyable? Teaming up with some friends to take on armies of opponents is real thrill stuff. Here you are, side by side, laying into the bad guys with right hooks, left uppercuts, and fireballs, “We Are The World” wailing from the old ghetto blaster in the meantime. And yet it’s incredibly satisfying to pull off a team attack! Even as I’m getting my ass kicked, I’m reveling in the high number of ass-kickings that are being delivered simultaneously.
The side-scrolling beat ’em up genre grew in sophistication along with video game technology. With each advance came experiments in new mechanics, making the gameplay of this type of game both deeper and more varied. This was certainly the case with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, which gave its players more powerful, unique moves they could use to clobber Foot Soldiers, as well as power-ups that let them do so with even greater effect. It was also true of Golden Axe, which put a Conan-esque fantasy aesthetic over top of the beat ’em up formula and allowed the players to use magic and wield a variety of deadly weapons in addition to just slapping their enemies around.
Some of the most important developments in the side-scrolling beat ’em up genre came with the introduction of home video game consoles. Once people could buy their own machines (e.g., the Super Nintendo Entertainment System), they could play to their heart’s content without plugging in all the quarters or tokens an arcade machine would gobble up.
First seen in Capcom’s Final Fight, but really brought glamorized with SNK’s Neo-Geo system, this was a more contemporary take on Capcom’s original (more macho) Street Fighter concept. Instead of Ryu and brawling in an underground, in the first arcade version one could have a good frisson roaming the streets and garage-top platforms, partnered with Hugo (the artist), Cody, Haggard’s on-the-surface, Aston Family, CYMO people (popular in Demolition Deathmatch), or the Tian Ling Dynasty Gang.
The shift in the dynamics of home console gaming was perfectly shown in Streets of Rage 2, a beat-em-up classic for the Sega Genesis that took everything good about the first game and amplified it. The graphics became better, the animation smoother, and the controls even more responsive. Streets of Rage 2 remains an example of how to create the kind of game that can provide an awesome, near arcade-perfect experience for couch gamers.
No matter how technology makes progress and leads the gaming industry into new eras, side-scrolling beat ’em ups never seem to go out of style. Not even the current generation, which is almost wholly dedicated to the online multiplayer framework and breathtaking computing power owners boast about, has been entirely immune to their simple charms. Words like “nostalgia” and “timeless” come naturally to mind for a reason—because a lot of us spent a good amount of time in our basements, bedrooms, and elsewhere inside nearly-bereft-of-sunshine settings, roller-skating and using skateboards as and in place of weapons for West Coast riots. Games like those, and far better ones, are still available.
The lasting attraction of side-scrolling beat ’em ups is just how pick-up-and-play they are. This is the kind of genre that more or less any person could sit down and immediately understand. A countable few commands execute a series of moves unique to each character. Some are punches, some are kicks, and in several classic beat ’em ups, they combine to form that character’s signature move.
On top of this, beat ’em ups are extremely accessible, largely because their mechanics are simple and easy to understand. They’re certainly more accessible than role-playing games, which have intricate mechanics that take several hours to learn.
One aspect that draws people to the side-scrolling “beat ’em ups” is their timelessness. Their graphics and sound effects might not impress modern gamers, but fans of older games consider them to be charming. We see an aesthetic in those games that holds up and delights us. The musical score, heard combining smoothing sounds like an old FM radio with some grating noise from an obsolete peripheral, conjures a unique, pleasing atmosphere. The “why” of the game’s score almost tells a creative player what to love about the game.
Looking ahead, it’s quite apparent that side-scrolling beat ’em ups will always have a clear place in future gaming. Nothing about that seems to be changing. These are far from huge blockbuster hits, but within most every “era” of gaming since the arcade days when I was a kid, from the side-scrolling days of the 16-bit era to the mobile side scrolling of today’s “competing inside a silly sort of 10-minute e-sports world,” there usually seems to be a simple side-scrolling fighter somewhere within the layers and platforms of the gaming market.
So, when you’re longing for not just a break, but a different set of experiences in your gaming life, and you’re coming from the closest you might typically get to my generation’s idea of a life well spent on a frontier—The Witcher 3, say, or the latest Red Dead or Fortnite extravaganzas—consider what we might call my midlife crisis fantasy of a change of pace: the absolutely golden era of side-scrolling beat-’em-ups. One thing I can say about my beloved childhood is that I wasn’t hit quite as often as my avatars.
