why did they make double dragon 3 so hard

The two films are very different but both depict a video-game-friendly narrative of a run-down America where violence solves everything. 'We didn't have a whole lot of time, so we had a 3-monitor set-up where we could watch other movies at the same time, as told us to 'watch them all and learn from them'' according to Nishitani. He also noticed that American arcades operated on tokens which facilitated coin-crunching gameplay - 'Americans would buy all their tokens up front and then buy multiple credits for a game in one go' - as opposed to Japanese players who were ponying up 100 yen of actual money per play and trying to make that last.Īkiman returned to Japan and pitched his ideas to designer Akira Nishitani 'and he helped me out on the planning for Final Fight.' Since their plan was to chase American dollars, they watched American movies for research, with two in particular having a big impact: Streets of Fire (1984) and Hard Times (1975), both directed by Walter Hill. He was surprised to see that Americans were all about tough-guy action games like Double Dragon and 'they weren’t trying to clear the stages on one coin they just wanted to have a good time punching and beating stuff up,' he said in a 2003 interview translated by Shmuplations. He was a side-scrolling shooter fan ('I thought that Gradius was the best' he said in a recent interview) who had worked on Capcom shooters like Side Arms and Forgotten Worlds. Kids didn't need to leave the house to play their favorite games anymore and Capcom must have noticed that Mega Man and Mega Man 2 were doing better in the living room than anything they could put into arcades.Įnter Akira 'Akiman' Yasuda, an illustrator at Capcom who visited the US to see what was happening at the local arcades. By now home consoles were off and running the NES was a legitimate phenomenon and Sega was igniting the console wars by launching the Genesis in the US.

Lest anyone forget, 30 years ago was 1989, and by that point arcades in the US were not the cultural meccas they had been at the start of the decade. Pretty impressive for a game made in six months by a small team who were specifically targeting American arcade-goers. 30 years ago, Capcom released Final Fight in arcades, a quasi-sequel* to Street Fighter (despite being a different genre) that would help usher in the Silver Age of Arcade Games until its own quasi-sequel, Street Fighter II, debuted in 1991 and changed the world.

Why did they make double dragon 3 so hard