Double Dragon NES

Double Dragon, ported to NES in 1988 from Technos Japan’s 1987 arcade original, is one of the games most directly credited with defining the beat-’em-up genre’s template: brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee fight their way through the Black Warriors gang to rescue Billy’s kidnapped girlfriend, using punches, kicks, and enemy weapons picked up mid-fight, moving left to right through increasingly hostile city blocks.

The NES port made real compromises to fit the hardware — the arcade’s simultaneous two-player mode was cut to alternating single-player turns, since the NES couldn’t display both brothers’ full movesets on screen at once without slowdown — but it added something the arcade never had: a two-player competitive Duel mode, where Billy and Jimmy fight each other directly, which became a genuinely popular feature in its own right rather than just a consolation prize for the lost co-op.

Its commercial success on NES is a big part of why the beat-’em-up genre exploded through the following NES and Genesis years — Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and dozens of others owe their basic structure, directly or indirectly, to what Double Dragon established here.