Vigilante

Vigilante is a 1988 brawler from Irem, the studio that helped establish the walk-and-punch genre back in 1984 with Kung-Fu Master. Vigilante is a loose continuation of that idea: you march through the streets from left to right, a gang keeps throwing bodies at you from both sides, and everything comes down to fists, kicks and judging distance correctly.

The version catalogued here comes from the PC Engine, sold in America as the TurboGrafx-16, with the Data East label attached to the release. At the end of the eighties the PC Engine was exceptionally well suited to arcade conversions, so the side view, the large sprites and the brisk pacing of the coin-op survived the trip home.

Mechanically this is honest single-player simplicity. Beat 'em ups of that era were not yet built on combos and throws; they were built on rhythm, stamina and reading enemies. A round is short, the difficulty ramps up fast and mistakes are punished instantly, exactly as arcade economics demanded.

The Data East credit on this entry also shows how the market divided its labour: one company built the coin-op, another handled the console release abroad, and the name on the box need not match the team that wrote the game.

That is also why Vigilante works today as a textbook of the genre before Final Fight arrived: you can see what the later famous brawlers grew out of, and how little a game actually needs to be entertaining. OldGame.cz runs Vigilante directly in your browser, so you can step into the street fight right away.