SegaIn the mid-to-late 1980s, any frequent visitors to their local arcade would be greeted by a few examples of a specific type of game: the side-scrolling beat-em-up. First introduced by 1984’s Kung-Fu Master, it was a subgenre of arcade action game iconic for its playstyle, which featured a two-dimensional horizontally-moving plane that either one or two players would navigate (exclusively from left-to-right or vertically as well in the belt-scroll variety) while engaging in hand-to-hand combat with various enemy combatants. That initial debut was inspired by Hong Kong martial arts cinema (particularly Meals on Wheels and Game of Death, starring Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively), as were many of the earlier examples, including the incredibly influential 1987 game Double Dragon (which itself owes a debt to Enter the Dragon and the Mad Max series).While the genre’s origins in East Asia meant that it drew significantly from films and manga coming out of the region, as the beat-em-up grew in popularity in the West, developers started to imbue new games with different cultural touchstones. Classics like Golden Axe received a heavy coat of fantasy painting and laid the foundation for what would become the hack-and-slash genre in the modern day, while releases such as the X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade games drew obvious inspiration from comic books and cartoons. But another popular beat-em-up aesthetic was the urban, borderline apocalyptic crime setting, and perhaps the best known example of this style was the Streets of Rage series. And now, almost as if closing a loop of cinematic influence, those games are officially getting their own film adaptation.Forgotten to time until 2020 brought another installment, Streets of Rage was a huge touchstone of the arcade era. | SegaOn Monday, The Hollywood Reporter revealed the director and writer team that would be bringing Streets of Rage to the big screen, 35 years after the original game debuted in arcades. There were brief talks of a film or television adaptation as far back as 2016, along with several other Sega classics (including Golden Axe and House of the Dead), but those plans stalled out and the rights eventually reverted back to Sega. This new attempt is coming from Lionsgate, with a creative team of Jeymes Samuel (the director of the 2021 Black revisionist Western The Harder They Fall) and writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller.Beat-em-up games were never particularly noteworthy for their stories, and Streets of Rage isn't an exception. The threadbare narrative follows a group of ex-police officers who have turned to vigilantism in order to take their neon-lit city back from the clutches of the gang lord Mr. X. Based in part on the exploits of TV cops like Starsky and Hutch, the original three playable characters were pastiches of the no-nonsense action cop archetype named Adam Hunter, Axel Stone, and Blaze Fielding.The influence of American buddy-cop movies is all over Streets of Rage, especially the character designs. | SegaBack when the project was first announced, the attached writer was none other than Derek Kolstad, the architect of the first three John Wick films, which would have been a perfect fit considering the heavy martial arts influence across that franchise. However, considering that Casey and Miller wrote the scripts for the Sonic the Hedgehog films (another classic Sega franchise), perhaps the rights holders felt more comfortable handing off another ‘80s game adaptation to a familiar team. With the exception of the recently released Mortal Kombat 2, none of the video game movies that have hit it off big recently have been of the action-adventure variety — but hopefully an accomplished genre director, two writers familiar with the workings of game adaptations, and a beloved vintage IP are enough to change that trend.