Weird NES Double Dragon Ad
Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 12:21 am
I recently managed to get my hands on the short-lived and under-appreciated N-Lords comic series (any other fans, here?).
While I’ve been enjoying it for its usual cheesy, 80s goodness, I noticed an ad in issue #3 (November 1987) for the then-unreleased NES port of Double Dragon. At first, I didn’t pay it much notice. It looks like any other promotional ad, circa the time. But on second glance, this is not the game we know. It seems Tradewest initially planned to take the game in a very different direction, than the arcade version. I’m guessing that before they did, the folks at Technos stepped in, and set the record straight.
[Until I can find a better scan somewhere, you’ll have to make do with my old AF14. I kept it as clean as I could. Sorry.]
The first thing you’ll notice is the artwork from the arcade bezel – but take a closer look. The tattoos have been switched! Billy is now Spike, and Jimmy is Hammer (which might explain why that’s the way they made it, in the Sega Master System storyline).
Then, there’s the write-up. There’s some really weird stuff in there, like wielding the dragon sword, and explicitly referring to Marian as a cop! Remember, this is 1987 – the original game was still tearing it up in the arcades, and nobody had even thought of licensing it for comics or a cartoon.
Finally, I had a look at the screenshots. I took some better scans of just those, here.
Billy, Jimmy, Marian, Abobo, Willy and what looks like early versions of Williams and Roper are all there, but … different.
Chin and Linda are not shown, but given that Chin wasn’t in the arcade game anyway, and Nintendo didn’t like to portray violence against women, maybe that’s not surprising.
So there you have it. Double Dragon on the NES might’ve turned out to be a VERY different game.
While I’ve been enjoying it for its usual cheesy, 80s goodness, I noticed an ad in issue #3 (November 1987) for the then-unreleased NES port of Double Dragon. At first, I didn’t pay it much notice. It looks like any other promotional ad, circa the time. But on second glance, this is not the game we know. It seems Tradewest initially planned to take the game in a very different direction, than the arcade version. I’m guessing that before they did, the folks at Technos stepped in, and set the record straight.
[Until I can find a better scan somewhere, you’ll have to make do with my old AF14. I kept it as clean as I could. Sorry.]
The first thing you’ll notice is the artwork from the arcade bezel – but take a closer look. The tattoos have been switched! Billy is now Spike, and Jimmy is Hammer (which might explain why that’s the way they made it, in the Sega Master System storyline).
Then, there’s the write-up. There’s some really weird stuff in there, like wielding the dragon sword, and explicitly referring to Marian as a cop! Remember, this is 1987 – the original game was still tearing it up in the arcades, and nobody had even thought of licensing it for comics or a cartoon.
Finally, I had a look at the screenshots. I took some better scans of just those, here.
Billy, Jimmy, Marian, Abobo, Willy and what looks like early versions of Williams and Roper are all there, but … different.
Chin and Linda are not shown, but given that Chin wasn’t in the arcade game anyway, and Nintendo didn’t like to portray violence against women, maybe that’s not surprising.
So there you have it. Double Dragon on the NES might’ve turned out to be a VERY different game.
