Old-School Fighting Games: Rage of the Dragons

Released in 2002, Rage of the Dragons is the spiritual sequel to the 1995 title Double Dragon.

If there is one major thing that SNK’s Neo-Geo is famous for, it’s the plethora of fighting games made available to play on its arcade and console hardware. Most of those fighting games became figurative “hole in the wall” titles that you wouldn’t know of unless you did some deep digging.

SNK, when it was known as the Playmore Corporation (2001–2003), released a 2D tag-team fighting game titled Rage of the Dragons. It was released at arcades in June of 2002 and ported to the Neo-Geo AES console in September 2002. The game was developed jointly by the Japan-based Noise Factory and the Mexico-based Evoga which originally aimed to be a direct sequel to the 1995 fighting game Double Dragon (which was based on the critically panned live-action film in 1994, starring Scott Wolf and Marc Descascos) that was developed by Technos Japan.

That was ultimately deemed impossible at the end, though.

After Technos Japan ceased to exist, the former staff members formed a new company called Million. The company purchased the intellectual rights to the franchise, along with the characters, before it went defunct and its properties were acquired by Arc…