![]() Alone, Abobo felt almost insurmountable, but working as a team to topple such a powerful opponent was something very few games could match back then. But the biggest draw was being able to play side-by-side with a friend, working together to defeat gangs and rescue Marian. “In the late 1980s, the first machine we’d look for in an arcade was Double Dragon,” he recalls “Of course, it was an exciting action game with detailed graphics and a cool setting. I asked him about the impact Double Dragon has had on the co-op game genre. Tomm Hulett is a director at WayForward, which has produced many co-op games such as River City Girls. This, coupled with the nature of arcade games at the time, meant a playthrough – even with a teammate – wouldn’t become too easy. Double Dragon’s AI and combat was intended to be as true to real life as possible. It’s worth mentioning the game’s high difficulty. That the brothers Billy and Jimmy could strike each other would inspire players to set out their own rules and devise gameplay strategies. It also led to one of its most memorable moments, as two players would ultimately face off against the other at the game’s end during a cooperative playthrough. It increased excitement, with a single punch – accidental or otherwise – causing the affected player to cry out, and even retaliate. But I believe Double Dragon has been loved for so long partly because of the inherent danger in its implementation of friendly fire. More recently, games have separated cooperative and competitive game modes partly, perhaps, to avoid player frustration at friendly fire. The mechanic would remain for the game’s full release. During the US localization tests for Double Dragon, the team observed that many players who started a two-player game not only played cooperatively, but also started attacking each other. Friendly fire had been designed and implemented in the game at this point. These allow the development team to see how the game performs by bringing the cabinet to a small number of select locations and monitoring players’ reactions. Location tests in the arcade sector are a way of gaining player feedback. However, its inclusion in Double Dragon came about from player interactions during location tests. It added a layer of strategy to combat, as players would need to communicate with each other during gameplay to avoid striking each other. The decision to include friendly fire or notįriendly fire was a relatively new concept back in the 1980s. For the first time, the series’ story was altered to include a third brother for the third title. The result was the first Double Dragon.Īt a later date and in similar fashion, the team proposed a title that’d use a three-player cabinet, resulting in 1990’s Double Dragon 3. As such, Technos Japan’s in-house sales team – which was very powerful at the time – made a strong proposal to the development team that it should consider creating a game for a two-player cabinet. In this way, the number of players for any given game would be determined before development would commence, so the game would fit the cabinet type that needed to be sold. In the 1980s, the video game business’s strategy was focused in the arcade sector, chiefly sales of arcade cabinets. The origins of the original’s co-op mechanics When PlayStation asked me to reflect on the series as it marks its 35 th anniversary this year, I decided to interweave stories I personally heard from the game’s creator and then director (1988) Yoshihisa Kishimoto as well as WayForward’s Tomm Hulett. ![]() In the past, I worked on the River City series and Double Dragon 4 as a producer, illustrator, etc. My name is Takaomi Kaneko from Arc System Works.
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