One general question I have: when someone like Sega creates a port of a game made by someone else for their own hardware, what level of assistance are they offered, if any? Whether in the form of access to personnel involved in the original game, code, art assets, etc.?
Or another way to ask it: what advantages did Sega have when porting their OWN arcade games, compared to someone else's?
My general sense is that a remarkable amount of stuff had to be reverse-engineered and rebuilt from scratch. I can easily see how that focus on reverse-engineering can lead to a development process where the entire emphasis is on the best possible fidelity to the previous product and no one steps back and asks, "Did we make something fun?" Instead, they expect the fun to come automatically from the fidelity. Or they let the fidelity consume all their time so in the end they're rushed and never have time to think about fun.
Double Dragon on NES is more like a "re-imagining" of the arcade game than a port of it. It's still a flawed game, but during the design process they clearly decided to de-emphasize fidelity and instead emphasize fun. And also someone decided to make that 1v1 mode which was my favorite part of the thing anyway.
Those are fantastic questions that I don't have the answer to.
Given how often Sega ported other developers games in those days - specifically SG-1000, Master System and early Genesis titles - I would bet they just reverse-engineered the game to run on their console.
NES Double Dragon was developed/ported by Technos, and they developed the arcade game as well. Good on them for trying to make a port that utilized the strengths of the NES.
Loved the arcade game so much back in the day but damn the ports of Double Dragon were all lousy. I had the C64 game and rented out the Master System version and they were both awful. Just terrible.
Double Dragon was one of the first major gaming heartbreakers. Great read resurfacing all this buried pain.
Double Dragon is one of the first games I remember playing. Loved playing this version with my brother, especially beating each other’s character up at the end. In retrospect it’s not a great version. The graphics aren’t the best (I always thought the baseball bat looked more like a bowling pin) the colors are garish and yeah, the only way to get through it is to spam jump kicks like we used to do back then. Wish I knew what happened to my copy of this game though!
Kind of a full circle moment that the apparent developers of this version, Arc System Works ended up owning the Double Dragon IP.
Never played the Sega Master System version, but I put a lot of time into the NES game. The "leveling" mechanic was such a novel idea back then, especially for a beat 'em up. I always had to jump kick cheese the Abobos though, their slaps hurt
Great article man. I'd forgotten that there was no co-op on the Master System, but now you mention it, it's all coming back.
I remember one Christmas, me and my cousins playing DD2 co-op mode on the Megadrive (UK version of the Genesis). The power had gone out during a storm, so we were playing it (and alot of other stuff) on an old petrol generator. We were on the last boss when this kid pulled out the plug from the generator. And of course, no save feature meant we had to go back to the start. Wounded! But playing back that memory now is a lot of fun.
One general question I have: when someone like Sega creates a port of a game made by someone else for their own hardware, what level of assistance are they offered, if any? Whether in the form of access to personnel involved in the original game, code, art assets, etc.?
Or another way to ask it: what advantages did Sega have when porting their OWN arcade games, compared to someone else's?
My general sense is that a remarkable amount of stuff had to be reverse-engineered and rebuilt from scratch. I can easily see how that focus on reverse-engineering can lead to a development process where the entire emphasis is on the best possible fidelity to the previous product and no one steps back and asks, "Did we make something fun?" Instead, they expect the fun to come automatically from the fidelity. Or they let the fidelity consume all their time so in the end they're rushed and never have time to think about fun.
Double Dragon on NES is more like a "re-imagining" of the arcade game than a port of it. It's still a flawed game, but during the design process they clearly decided to de-emphasize fidelity and instead emphasize fun. And also someone decided to make that 1v1 mode which was my favorite part of the thing anyway.
Those are fantastic questions that I don't have the answer to.
Given how often Sega ported other developers games in those days - specifically SG-1000, Master System and early Genesis titles - I would bet they just reverse-engineered the game to run on their console.
NES Double Dragon was developed/ported by Technos, and they developed the arcade game as well. Good on them for trying to make a port that utilized the strengths of the NES.
Loved the arcade game so much back in the day but damn the ports of Double Dragon were all lousy. I had the C64 game and rented out the Master System version and they were both awful. Just terrible.
Double Dragon was one of the first major gaming heartbreakers. Great read resurfacing all this buried pain.
Double Dragon limped so Double Dragon II (NES) could soar
Double Dragon is one of the first games I remember playing. Loved playing this version with my brother, especially beating each other’s character up at the end. In retrospect it’s not a great version. The graphics aren’t the best (I always thought the baseball bat looked more like a bowling pin) the colors are garish and yeah, the only way to get through it is to spam jump kicks like we used to do back then. Wish I knew what happened to my copy of this game though!
Kind of a full circle moment that the apparent developers of this version, Arc System Works ended up owning the Double Dragon IP.
So cool that you had this version!
Sounds like it was fun back in the day and that's all that matters
Never played the Sega Master System version, but I put a lot of time into the NES game. The "leveling" mechanic was such a novel idea back then, especially for a beat 'em up. I always had to jump kick cheese the Abobos though, their slaps hurt
Technos was ahead of the curve back then, as evidenced by their later NES brawler with RPG elements, River City Ransom.
Jump kicking Abobos is always the way, haha.
Great article man. I'd forgotten that there was no co-op on the Master System, but now you mention it, it's all coming back.
I remember one Christmas, me and my cousins playing DD2 co-op mode on the Megadrive (UK version of the Genesis). The power had gone out during a storm, so we were playing it (and alot of other stuff) on an old petrol generator. We were on the last boss when this kid pulled out the plug from the generator. And of course, no save feature meant we had to go back to the start. Wounded! But playing back that memory now is a lot of fun.
Aw man, that is a bummer and also a classic gaming memory at the same time!