Best Retro Beat-Em-Ups of All Time

The Beat-Em-Up: Cooperative Action at Its Purest

The belt-scrolling beat-em-up defined cooperative gaming for an entire generation. Two players stood side by side at the arcade cabinet, pressing through waves of enemies toward a boss, spending quarters for continues while the cabinet’s two-player design drove engagement. The home console versions — with their limited continues and sometimes-hostile difficulty — created the shared household challenge of actually completing games like Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and TMNT: Turtles in Time.

The genre’s golden age ran from 1987’s Double Dragon through approximately 1994, when 3D graphics and fighting games with more precise controls pulled player attention away. Within that window, developers produced enough definitive titles to sustain a devoted community for decades.

Streets of Rage 2 — The Peak of the Genre

Streets of Rage 2 (1992) is the answer to “what is the best beat-em-up ever made?” It’s the question, the answer, and the reason the question was ever worth asking. Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack — delivered through the Genesis FM synthesis chip at maximum capability — is one of the greatest game soundtracks ever composed for any genre. The combat engine, with four characters featuring meaningfully different move sets, special moves with strategic health costs, and a satisfying weight to every hit, set the mechanical standard for every beat-em-up that followed.

The level design escalates from a city street brawl to a casino, a baseball stadium, a ship deck, a factory, and a final boss encounter designed to make cooperative play feel genuinely earned. No beat-em-up before or after Streets of Rage 2 combined all elements — soundtrack, combat, level design, characters, cooperative balance — at this level simultaneously.

Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder — The Hidden Masterpiece

Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder (1992) was an arcade-only title in most regions that never received a home conversion outside Japan. Four-player simultaneous play — doubled from the original’s two-player design — combined with larger sprites, more varied environments, and rideable creatures with unique special attacks made it the most technically accomplished game in the Golden Axe series.

Because it never appeared on Genesis or SNES, it remained essentially unknown to home console players throughout the era. Modern arcade preservation and emulation have given it new life, and players discovering it for the first time consistently recognize it as the definitive Golden Axe experience.

Batman Returns (SNES) — The Dark Beat-Em-Up

Konami’s 1992 SNES adaptation of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns was a beat-em-up that took its source material seriously. The slower, heavier combat — Batman moves deliberately, his grapple mechanic adds tactical options the game’s arcade version lacked — matched the film’s gothic atmosphere. The visual presentation, capturing the film’s expressionist production design, made the SNES version significantly different from the Genesis version’s brighter, more conventional beat-em-up.

At two players, Batman Returns offered one of the SNES’s better cooperative beat-em-up experiences, with boss encounters designed specifically for the dual-player dynamic.