The Making Of...
How a team of French Japanophiles cashed in their credits to revive a classic Sega series
How Streets Of Rage 4 gave new life to Sega’s classic 16bit series
Walk down a city street you haven’t visited in a couple of decades and it’s unlikely that everything will be as you remember it. Businesses may have come and gone. The road might have fallen into disrepair. Regeneration may be attracting a new crowd these days. It’s not dissimilar to playing Streets Of Rage 4, a continuation of Sega’s 16bit beat’em-up series, which sees its vigilante heroes and a couple of new allies return to deliver their particular brand of street justice more than a quarter of a century on from the previous game.
In the meantime, Wood Oak City has fallen back into urban decay. Buildings are boarded up, pavement tiles cracked or missing altogether, and even the neon signs don’t blaze the way they used to. But entering from the left side of the screen onto the same stage layout that kicked off Streets Of Rage 2, complete with a soundtrack callback to Yuzo Koshiro’s ‘Go Straight’ theme – composed by the man himself – we know which streets we’re back on.
Still, things have changed around here, most noticeably in terms of visual design. Returning characters haven’t only grown older (or, in Axel’s case, chunkier), they’ve also been given a new lease of life thanks to vibrant, hand-drawn art. Lizardcube’s art director, Ben Fiquet, began drawing concepts for a modern Streets Of Rage shortly after finishing work on Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap in 2017. While sharing a drink with Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert, the pair discovered they both had the same idea about getting hold of the licence for their next project.
Plans for Streets Of Rage 4 had failed to materialise in the past. In 2011 Sega shut down a fan remake that mashed up the trilogy into one hybrid release, while rejected pitches for an official game turned into forgettable clones such as Core Design’s Fighting Force. At the time, even with the indie-developed Sonic Mania in the works, there was no guarantee Sega would be open to reviving a long-dormant IP. That same year, the publisher turned down a pitched sequel to cult favourite Jet Set Radio, despite an attractive visual proof of concept from Dinosaur Games. When Imbert flew out to Tokyo to convince Sega, he had little more than the pitch and some of Fiquet’s artwork, although he did have one other advantage: trust.
While Lizardcube had been working on developing The Dragon’s Trap with original creator Ryuchi Nishizawa, Dotemu, as the game’s publisher, was instrumental in securing the rights, which half-belonged to Sega. “Dotemu has been working with classic Japanese videogame companies for more than ten years,” Imbert explains. “I’ve had the incredible chance to meet with pioneers in the videogame industry. It taught us the necessary humility and respect to
“WHAT MAKES THE GAME IS THE AI, THE MOVESETS, THE RHYTHM OF HOW WE CONFIGURE ENCOUNTERS”
work on famous licences. Building a reputation in Japan is a long and difficult process, but little by little the word passes that you can be trusted.” That The Dragon’s Trap did well both commercially and critically was integral to pitching Streets Of Rage 4.
The next challenge was persuading fans. “We had some fairly distressed reactions from long-time fans and, honestly, I don’t blame them,” Fiquet admits. He’s referring to the game’s announcement teaser from August 2018, which introduced a visual style worlds away from the original pixel art and featured a soundtrack led by rock guitar chords rather than the techno that had defined the series. “These games are so many things for so many different people. Ultimately, what we’re trying to achieve is something that will be inherently personal.”
Given that Sega had been sold on the basis of Fiquet’s drawings, a pixel-art approach was never considered, and he hoped the hand-drawn aesthetic would help the game appeal beyond a nostalgic fanbase. “I wanted to try to make a Streets Of Rage game as I envisioned it as a kid, which was not focused on the pixels but fully animated characters,” Fiquet says. “Some interesting comments we had were that people were remembering the games as dark and gritty. But honestly, those were some of the most vibrant colours you could find in a Sega game.”
The aesthetic wasn’t the only thing that was new. While The Dragon’s Trap was a remake that reverse-engineered the original Master System code, Streets Of Rage 4’s
brawling gameplay would need to be built from scratch. Fortunately, Dotemu’s lead designer,
Jordi Asensio, already had the perfect experience. In 2009, he co-founded Guard Crush Games in Montreal with childhood friend
Cyrille Lagarigue. Together they developed
Streets Of Fury, which Asensio describes as a “Guardian Heroes and Fatal Fury hybrid”. The game engine, based on MonoGame, was a perfect fit for another beat-’em-up, so it made sense for the pair to reunite for Streets Of Rage 4,
with Lagarigue as the main programmer.
“There were several benefits to making our own engine, as we could tailor all of our tools to the artists’ and game designers’ workflow,” Lagarigue explains. “It takes a little longer to implement at first, but it paid off in the end because we were then able to integrate and iterate on content very fast, which is paramount for a team of our small size.” Compared to an engine such as Unity, which comes with a lot of stock effects and rendering techniques baked in, it also allowed the team to experiment more, giving the game a more distinct look.
“When you look at Unity or Unreal, they were built around FPSes first, which revolve around the layout of the environment,” Asensio says. “As such, you really need to tweak your geometry and collisions. But beat-’em-ups are more like encounters in turn-based RPGs: the environment is merely a backdrop to bring context, memorability or uniqueness to a stage, but won’t influence its flow. What makes the game is the AI, the movesets, the rhythm of how we place and configure those encounters.”
While recreating the basic building blocks of
Streets Of Rage in their engine – moving from left to right, beating up waves of enemies with
movesets that work with the classic three-button configuration – Asensio and the team wanted to make sure they were adding something fresh, too. “It was really about staying true to the original but also about analysing what worked well and replicating it with today’s standards.”
One adjustment came in the form of special moves, which in previous games had cost health to trigger. That was replaced by a green health drain which can be recovered by successfully landing attacks on enemies, Bloodborne style. It was intended to add an element of risk and reward, so just a single jab could cost you all your green health or your combo score bonus. “Your brain must stay [switched] on,” Asensio says. “And we wanted that for a genre that has a reputation for being just dull button mashing.”
It’s reminiscent of PlatinumGames’ best design practices, with high scores, completion time and remaining health all contributing to your rank at the end of a stage. And splitting the campaign into individual stages means that each can be kept challenging enough for players to repeat, practise and improve. By comparison, the decision to give the player limited lives seems a little archaic, we suggest. Asensio: “We kept a life system for two reasons. First, it plays well with the way healing items are placed in the levels, so that you can get farther if you get the chicken just before losing a life. Second, they were a nice way to close the loop of combos increasing the score, which is also how you get extra lives.”
This is far from the only nod back to the old ways. You can unlock the full 16bit roster from the first three games, each character recreated in all their pixel-art glory. Attacking in-game arcade cabinets – adorned with the words ‘Bare Knuckle’, a reference to the series’ Japanese title – transports the player into bonus boss fights lifted straight from Streets Of Rage 2, complete with CRT scan lines. With the ability to switch out the background music for FM-synthesis tunes from the past games, we have to ask: was all this a way to placate retro-minded fans?
“Not at all,” Lagarigue says. “At first, we did put some classic sprites in the game to test character movements in the engine before the first characters were completed with the new art style. We were then surprised how well these sprites integrated with the rest of the art style, and how fun it was to beat up the new HD enemies. Since we had the rights to use all the original graphics, we thought, ‘Why not add fun secrets and
unlockable characters?’” If anything, the ability to play as all four versions of Axel and Blaze demonstrated just how far each version had iterated and improved on its predecessors – something the Streets Of Rage 4 team was keen to continue.
A sequel was a chance to bring in new blood, onscreen as well as off. Floyd was a natural fit, with a muscular build and robotic arms that placed him somewhere between Max and
Zan. When it came to the other new addition, Cherry (an agile aerial character who filled Skate’s role), “I wanted to give her a gimmick that would set her apart,” Fiquet says. There was some pushback from the team to the idea he landed on, “but I was pretty adamant to have her fighting with a guitar.” A prelude, perhaps, to the fan reaction to the guitars on the announcement trailer’s soundtrack – but again, the changes won out.
Arguably the highlight of Streets Of Rage 4’s roster, however, was the long-overdue return of Adam, who makes a surprise entrance midway through the campaign. Having not been playable since the first game, more work was required to modernise the character’s moveset, and Asensio confesses that he almost wasn’t included for time reasons. “But after the reveal trailer, everyone was so loud about him that we had to squeeze him in.” The effort was worth it.
In 1991, Adam was a rare early example of an African-American hero in videogames, and his return resonated even more strongly than the team could have expected. Less than a month after
Streets Of Rage 4’s release, the murder of George Floyd by police officers saw people across the world taking to the streets in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The game deals with police corruption, and puts officers alongside the criminal gangs attacking from the right.
Fiquet, who wrote the story back in 2018, views it as a reflection of the real world, rather than a commentary. “Social inequalities, police brutality, class war – these are very strong issues that concern everyone.” It’s not as overtly political as Beatdown In Treachery City, another beat’em-up released around the same time, but it’s still cathartic on its own terms.
On the streets of Wood Oak City, things feel familiar yet fresh – a tricky balance that Streets Of Rage 4 navigates well, and was rewarded for both critically and commercially. Dotemu confirms it has plans for DLC in the future, and is currently keeping busy as the publisher of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. While it continues working to modernise vintage classics – which, Imbert says, “is why we exist at Dotemu” – could another Sega revival be on the cards? Fiquet and Asensio fire off a few titles from their wishlist, including Golden Axe, Shining Force and
Panzer Dragoon Saga. “There are many games I’d like to tackle,” Fiquet says. “But for now, we’re in a good position to try our hands at personal projects, and I hope it’ll carry on.” Q