Renegade

Time to beat

Main story

52.5 h9 reports

Main + extras

77.5 h5 reports

Completionist

126.5 h3 reports

Median of the hours reported by players who completed the game.

Synopsis

Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun, released as Renegade in the West, is a 1986 beat 'em up video game developed by Technōs Japan and published by Taito for arcades. In the original Japanese version, the game revolves around Kunio, a high school delinquent who must stand up against a series of rival gangs that are targeting his classmate Hiroshi. In the Western version, the player controls a street brawler who must face four different gangs in order to rescue his girlfriend, who is being held captive by a mob boss. Conceptualized and designed by Yoshihisa Kishimoto, the game was semi-autobiographical, partly based on his own teenage high school years getting into daily fights, with Kunio partly based on himself. He also drew inspiration from the Bruce Lee martial arts film Enter the Dragon (1973), which inspired the game's "knock-down-drag-out" fights, along with his own altercations as a youth. In order to make the game more appealing for the West, Technos produced a graphically-altered version with a visual style inspired by the 1979 film The Warriors, changing the looks of some of the game's characters and scenery. It was an important game that defined the beat 'em up genre, establishing the standard gameplay format adopted by later games in the genre. In contrast to earlier side-scrolling martial arts games such as Kung-Fu Master (1984), Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun introduced key elements such as the belt scroll format where players can move horizontally and vertically in a scrolling arena-like space, a combat system incorporating combo attacks, the standard three-button control scheme, and a street brawling theme. It was the basis for Kishimoto's next game Double Dragon (1987), which further advanced and popularized its beat 'em up genre format. The game was ported to a variety of game consoles and home computer platforms. Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun was the first game in the long-running Kunio-kun series in Japan. The game's Western localization Renegade also spawned its own spin-off series from British company Ocean Software on home computers, with the sequels Target: Renegade (1988) and Renegade III: The Final Chapter (1989).

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

Details

Type

Game

Release date

January 1, 1986

Genres

beat 'em up

Platforms

ZX Spectrum, DOS, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Nintendo Entertainment System

Created by

Technōs Japan

Countries

Japan