Cover Art Chronicles: Fist of the Double Dragons

If you’re in your late-20s now, chances are you remember playing the Double Dragon games on NES (or another system), usually with a few buddies. But do you remember what you associated them with?  Some (if not all) of us human beings have the strange tendency to compare some forms of media to another when we see or play them, though that depends on how old you are. When looking at the covers or playing the intro, you might have compared them to some kung fu movie (“what if there were two Bruce Lee’s!?”) or show you might have found if you channel hopped to see what was on TV.

(Someone people thought this franchise itself would make good movie and cartoon adaptations. They very well could have been if they hadn’t been so loose, especially in the former’s case.)

But like a lot of old games, our friends across the sea — the ones that made this game — received completely different covers for some of the games. They’re always worth a look to try and see where the creators actually got their inspiration and ideas from. Considering it’s from Japan, it usually came from an anime or manga, but quite a few were inspired by western movies or comics. Taking one look at the Japanese cover for the first Double Dragon should tell you exactly what it was inspired by, if you’re familiar with the work.

Hell, that’s borderline blatant thievery! Looking at the American covers for the DD games (sans Double Dragon II’s, which had the same western comic-inspired cover for all regions aside from Marian’s “modified” skirt to cover her butt cheek in the western version), you would never know they were inspired by Fist of the North Star. Even if we received this cover then, we wouldn’t have known that back then due to the lack of FotNS’ presence on our shores. This was the reason why Tradewest decided to pick a different cover for westerns to associate it with.

And they did the same for Double Dragon III, though the “inspiration” is less blatant this time. You still can’t miss the comparisons to Kenshiro here with Billy Lee, who wears a similar single
shoulder pad (which Ken only wears in some of his interpretations) and has a similar hair style. It’s tough to see if Bimmy Jimmy Lee is wearing the same outfit behind him, but they made him look different by giving him a hairstyle that wouldn’t look out-of-place in a post apocalyptic or cyberpunk world in a form of media. DDII’s Japanese cover shows that he has a shoulder pad on his left shoulder, though. Their sprites were just palette swaps, though, making Jimmy a red, blonde Kenshiro.

The obvious FotNS inspiration is also present in some of the games themselves, and it goes beyond Billy almost donning Kenshiro’s color palette (he wears a lighter shade of blue). This intro to
the PC Engine version nearly makes it look like FotNS, though its urban environs aren’t quite as desolate and dreary. All it needed was some popping heads, a few techniques being shouted, and an “ATATATATATATATA” for good measure. We probably don’t need a new Double Dragon these days considering FotNS has entered the current brawler market (otherwise known as the “Musou” market) itself, but it’s good to remember things like this.

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