Double Dragon

The arcade version of the game was originally developed by Technos released in 1987 and distributed worldwide by Taito (who are often mistakenly credited for creating the game). The original Double Dragon was one of the earliest beat-em-ups or side-scrolling fighting games in which a player fights against a swarm of adversaries using martial arts or other close-combat techniques. Set in a post-apocalyptic version of New York, the goal in Double Dragon was to rescue your character's kidnapped girlfriend, Marian, from a gang known as the "Black Warriors." A single player would play as the game's hero, Billy Lee (in blue, who earned the unofficial nickname of Hammer by Taito), while a second player could join in as his brother, Jimmy Lee (in red, nicknamed Spike by Taito). The enemies in the game would use several techniques against the player, including the usage of weapons, which during such a case the enemy could be disarmed and have his or her weapon taken by the player. There were total of four stages or "missions" in the game, each with a different boss waiting at the end of the stage. The leader of the Black Warriors and the final boss in the game was Willy, who fought using a machine gun against the player. If two players manage to beat the game together, the game would force both of them to fight against each other and see who would win Marian.

The arcade version contained a number of bugs, most of which were never fixed despite several revisions of the ROM. The best known is a bug in the way enemies attack the player. Sportingly, enemies will not attack the player from behind, but will instead walk up to them and try to move past so they can attack from the front. Thus, by standing with your back to an enemy, it was possible to wait for them to get close and then elbow them in the face, without fear of being attacked. Another common bug was the "infinite bouncing" bug. Due to the fixed way in which objects in the game would bounce off walls, trees etc, it was possible to drop an item between two tree stumps on the forest level, and it would bounce back and forth forever. In the first version of the game, this could happen to player characters who fell off either stump, the only way to continue the game being to allow the timer to run down. Another less serious bug was the ability to throw weapons from one level to the next. Usually, weapons were discarded at the end of a level. On some levels however, the transition to the next level was achieved simply by scrolling the screen one whole screen to the right, or down a cliff. By standing at the extreme right of the level and jumping just as it ended, the player's character would drop their weapon in mid air, throwing it far enough to be picked up again once the screen had scrolled on.