After nearly 25 years lying dormant, Sega’s Streets Of Rage series will continue on.
Streets of Rage 4 is in development from publisher DotEmu and developers Lizardcube and Guard Crush Games, the publisher said this morning. DotEmu also released a trailer showing the game’s cartoon aesthetic and revealing the return of series mainstay protagonists Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. The company has not announced the platforms the game will appear on, nor its release date.
Called Bare Knuckle in Japan, Streets Of Rage was Sega’s home-grown entry in the popular side-scrolling beat-em-up genre, in the vein of Final Fight and Double Dragon. It had three successful entries on the Genesis in the 1990s, but went dark after that—as did the genre itself, in great part. A recent resurgence in interest in classic 2D games has led to multiple revivals of Double Dragon, and now Streets of Rage is the latest to make a return.
Developer Lizardcube is best known for the remake of Sega’s classic Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, while Guard Crush Games recently produced a side-scrolling beat-em-up called Streets Of Fury that was clearly inspired by, but unrelated to, the Sega series.
Earlier this month, DotEmu announced another unlikely sequel to a retro classic, Windjammers 2.