Streets of Rage (SoR) is a franchise that was utterly forgotten by Sega. Three Sega branded consoles, and one add-on, came and went without a SoR release. Well, not counting re-releases via compilations anyhow. That is a seriously long time for fans of the series to go without new content. It seemed Sega had completely forgotten what brought them to the dance. Even though things are looking up, it seems that Sega is not the ones behind the upcoming Streets of Rage 4.

16-Bit meant something

Streets of Rage was a big deal back in the 16-bit wars. Nintendo pretty much held most popular genres tightly. Except one. The scrolling brawler. For this, Nintendo depended on Capcom who had Final Fight. I am not sure what happened but Final Fight, as we will focus here, only hit one Sega branded console. That was the Sega CD add-on for the Sega Genesis. Nintendo’s Super NES on the other hand received three, or four depending on your stance on Final Fight Guy, games.

Sega had to do something. Streets of Rage was that “something” and it was a good entry that spawned two sequels on the Genesis. Then the Sega CD was announced, Sega 32X announced, Saturn announced, Dreamcast announced, etc. These all shared the fact that a new Streets of Rage game was not released for them. Sega seemingly gave up on giving gamers what they wanted.

16-Bit remembered, revived

Thanks to Dotemu acting as the publisher for Streets of Rage 4 with LIzardcube and Guard Crush Games, Streets of Rage 4 will finally see light of day. Sure, there were apparently attempts on previous consoles but those never surfaced outside of early gameplay development vids.

What is great about SoR 4 is that it appears that everyone behind it are treating this as a big deal. Not that there is a lot of pressure on them right now or anything. Just a few decades of angst within the community over wanting this. Nothing to worry about.

The newest trailer

We get a bit more detail about Streets of Rage 4 in this latest video. One, we meet a new character that resembles Jax from the Mortal Kombat universe. Like, seriously, it would not surprise me to find out lawyers were on the phone before the video finished playing.

Next, we find out that there will be up to four player co-op local multi-player. That is awesome.

Finally, according to Indie Retro News, Yūzō Koshiro, Motohiro Kawashima, Yoko Shimomura, Hideki Naganuma and Keiji Yamagishi are all making a comeback to provide music for SoR 4. How cool is that?

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait for the game to hit Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam for PC’s.

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Carl Williams

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