The mind behind two legendary beat 'em up franchises was 64.
River City Ransom is one of my favorite NES games of all time. One of my most complete homebrew games (informally called River City Ripoff) was a persistent multiplayer game that was essentially the same game, but with a bigger world. I even used the sprites. I couldn’t ever release it for obvious legal reasons, but it was run to play with some friends when testing it. I wished they had made something like it when they were doing those Steam sequels.
River City Ransom was awesome. Loved that game.
In case anybody isn’t aware of these…
Played it, was pretty good but it’s no river city ransom ex.
They’re actually still making kunio games, but they’re hella overpriced and not as good as river city girls
The kunio series was always fun to play. I remember spending a lot of time with crash n the boys street challenge because I could utilize the turbo functionality of my nes advantage controller to do crazy stuff.
64??? That means he must have been a teenager, or barely 20 when he made double dragon! Didn’t that come out in arcades in the early 80s?
Article says DD was 87. So he would have been mid 20’s.
That era really was so full of these great programmers making legendary games so young in their lives.
It’s kinda similar to the indie scene now, small teams or even solo devs can make things of a smaller scope and can try something totally new or innovate on an old idea in a way AAA games just can’t.
He died ultra young for a Japanese person.
