Captain America and the Avengers ARCADE

Captain America and the Avengers is Data East’s 1991 arcade beat-’em-up, letting one to four players simultaneously control Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, or Vision — a mix of Marvel heroes not otherwise closely associated as a team at the time — fighting through five stages to stop the Red Skull from conquering the world.

Most stages are traditional side-scrolling brawling, but two levels break format entirely into side-scrolling shooting segments — an underwater stage and a space stage — giving the game more mechanical variety than a typical licensed beat-’em-up of the era. Its four-player simultaneous co-op, unusually generous even by beat-’em-up standards, made it a standout among the wave of Marvel-licensed arcade games Data East and Capcom both produced in the early 1990s.