Piko Interactive has announced they have purchased the IP rights to SNK Playmore’s Rage of the Dragons.
We have acquired the IP rights for Rage of The Dragons! And we are currently working on plans for this game! pic.twitter.com/7524AU8Use
— PIKO (@Pikointeractive) May 10, 2020
While it’s interesting to see that this game will finally be made available on other platforms, it will be interesting to see what Piko has in mind in terms of porting this game. I don’t know about the company, but looking over their list of games they’ve worked on, it appears this may be their first fighting game. They also have only ported games to retro consoles, which begs to ask if Rage of the Dragons will be ported to current generation consoles, the PC or will this be yet another port to a retro console.
Rage of the Dragons was a play on TradeWest’s and Technos immensely popular Double Dragon arcade game, which SNK wanted to capitalize on. Look no further than the two main characters, Jimmy and Billy Lewis, who are copies of Double Dragon’s Jimmy and Billy (Or Bimmy) Lee. Development of title was meant to be a follow-up to the official Double Dragon fighter by SNK, but they weren’t able to get the rights. So the name was changed to Rage of the Dragons. This was one of SNK’s lesser-known fighting games, though it did go on to have a cult following. Sadly, this game never made it to home consoles, unless you had access to a NEO-GEO MVS, which was costly at the time.
What made this game stand out was the usage of a tag-team system that’s similar to that of Capcom’s Vs series. Instead of that from the King of Fighters where you only switch when your character is defeated, Rage of the Dragon’s allowed you to tag at any time. There’s even the ability to get the non-player involved by using a tag-team combo. It’s clear that SNK was trying to emulate Capcom’s success and while my time with this game was brief when I played this in the past.
We’ve reached out to Piko Interactive to see what their plans are for Rage of the Dragons and will update this story when we receive an update.
