Double Dragon

When Technōs Japan unleashed the beat 'em up Double Dragon into arcades in the mid-1980s, it became one of the genre's defining titles practically overnight and an inspiration for dozens of later games. A few years later, home consoles got their turn, and the Atari 7800 received its own version, published for the American market by Activision, at the time one of the most active publishers of arcade hit conversions to this and other home platforms.

The player fights their way through a series of scenes full of gangsters in the role of a street brawler, with the goal of rescuing a kidnapped girlfriend—a motif that became an almost mandatory template for the beat 'em up genre for the entire following decade. The repertoire of punches, kicks, and holds mirrors the arcade original within the limits of what the 7800 hardware could handle, including the ability to grab an opponent's weapon, such as a whip or a baseball bat, and turn it against the rest of the gang waiting for the player around every street corner.

The 7800 conversion logically couldn't fully match the visual richness of the arcade original, yet it remains among the more ambitious efforts to reach this console in 1989. For genre fans, it's an interesting look at how developers of the time handled porting a popular hit to hardware that was already not among the most powerful, while still trying to preserve the basic feel of street fights and progressing through a city full of opponents, even at the cost of simpler graphics and fewer enemies on screen.

Why play it: Double Dragon on the 7800 offers a home version of the legendary arcade brawler and is a good choice for anyone who wants to see the roots of the entire genre.