Target: Renegade

Crash Readers’ Awards liked the inlay art enough to place it high as well.

Then the sequels arrived: Target: Renegade in eighty-eight, Renegade III in eighty-nine, each chasing the same street myth.

Two sequels and a pile of awards say the brand stuck, even when the magazines argued.

Clear the pier without rage quitting, and you owned bragging rights until Target landed.

Oh, okay.

And then as much as I bad talked the Spectrum five minutes ago, let me retract all that and say that, like, the only Spectrum game that I would ever say is, uh, Target: Renegade is also one.

But the Robocop game on Spectrum is so good.

It is so, so-

But the very key fundamental elements of the genre start with this game.

Kung Fu Master was followed up in 1986 by Renegade.

And although you can consider Kung Fu Master the first beat-em-up, Renegade, which was developed by Technos Japan, is really the game that defined the genre.

It put a lot of the things we take for granted in there, such as the ability to move up and down the screen as well as left to right.

Renegade is about a street fighter named Mr. K trying to save his girlfriend from a group of gangsters.

You move from left to right beating up opponents and then you have your boss fight at the end of each section.

You've also got things in here like a double tap forward to dash.

There's a lot of things you see in this game that the genre will keep coming back to that will be like staples of lots and lots of games over the years.