Renegade – “There is always time to die”

Yoshihisa Kishimoto was born in Tokyo in 1961. There isn’t a lot of information available online in English on his early life, but he talked several times about getting into frequent fights at school, blaming family issues and getting dumped by a girl. Despite these distractions, he still did enough with his studies to get into art school, and then got a job as a game designer for Data East, which was an educational experience itself. He ended up working on some of their key Laserdisc games, like Cobra Command and Road Blaster. His work on those impressed Technos enough to headhunt Kishimoto to work on their own Laserdisc games. Once he got there, he asked to go in a different direction, and the resultant games’ impact ended up rather outlasting the Laserdisc.

Kishimoto wanted to make a game with some very loose autobiographical elements, depicting teenage mob fighting and taking a lead from Spartan-X/Kung Fu Master. That game had arguably been the starting point for the beat-’em-up genre, but Kishimoto would set some of its key early precedents. Rather than travelling left and right along a single plane like in Spartan-X, Kishimoto’s game would still scroll left and right but let you walk up and down on the screen as well. Technos granted him a team to work on his game, he named his teenage delinquent main character Kunio-kun, and the game became 熱血硬派くにおくん, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun.

Released in 1986, Kishimoto’s Kunio-kun game became a success in Japan. That would set him up nicely for two future paths. The first was assorted games with Kunio-kun as their star, across sports and other genres. The second was a further refinement of its martial-arts-influenced brawling into Double Dragon. Meanwhile, later in 1986, publishers Taito released the first Kunio-kun game in the West too, to some success. They called it Renegade, and made some significant changes to it. 

Taito reskinned the majority of the characters and scenery. Concerned with the game’s context not translating, they took away any evidence that your hero or any of the gangs he faces off against are schoolchildren, and gave him the new name Renegade. They also got rid of most of the narrative sequences, and the plot in which he defends a bullied friend. The arcade version of Renegade was not as big a success in the UK, but did well enough to lead to home versions, which would in a sense be adaptations of an adaptation. Top British software house Ocean, reaching the end of their long-term deal to convert Konami’s arcade games, were after some different arcade games for their Imagine label, and signed up Renegade. Ocean had been going through some changes in their approach, and Renegade was to be one of the first tests of their new model.

At the end of 1985, Ocean brought in Gary Bracey, who had previously run a computer shop, to head up all their game development as software manager. Owners Jon Woods and David Ward were concerned at their own lack of knowledge on games and the increasingly unwieldy development process across their large number of releases. Bracey immediately identified problems with Ocean’s approach to outsourcing games to teenagers they had barely any contact with. He has often specifically cited the badly received Knight Rider (a #5 hit in August 1986), which had started development when he arrived, as an example of the perils of that approach.

Bracey’s answer was to hire more staff to produce games in-house. Ocean cleared out the basement of their office building in Manchester, previously used for storage, to make room for the newcomers, it became ‘the dungeon’ for programmers. One of the first new programmers hired under Gary Bracey’s watch, Mike Lamb, ended up being the one to program the Spectrum version of Renegade.

Mike Lamb was born in 1964, three years after Yoshihisa Kishimoto, and grew up in Yorkshire. His interviews give no mention of whether or not he got into fights at school. He started programming in 1980 at the age of 16, when his dad brought home a Commodore PET from his job lecturing at Hull University. Mike Lamb played Space Invaders and did some programming in BASIC. 

A couple of years later, one of his friends’ younger brother, William Wray, wrote a ZX81 version of Space Invaders and got it picked up and released by Artic, making a few hundred pounds. Then Wray wrote a version of Galaxians for the Spectrum and made even more. As Mike Lamb told World of Spectrum, “I was arrogant enough to think anything anybody a year younger than me could do, I could do”. He got his own Spectrum and set to work.

While at Cambridge University studying Electrical Science, Lamb created a pool simulator, straightforwardly called Pool, and in 1983 got it released by CDS, based not far from Hull in Doncaster. I won’t talk about Pool any further here, since I will be writing about it as part of a forthcoming post. In 1984, Lamb then refined that into another, more successful game for CDS, Steve Davis Snooker. I also won’t talk about that one any further here, since it will be the subject of a forthcoming post. (Thanks to budget reissues, from here until about 1992, the chronology of this blog gets a little wibbly-wobbly.)

Since Lamb’s earnings from his first couple of games were already outdoing his dad’s lecturer salary, he decided to go into writing games full-time after finishing university. CDS asked him to write a golf simulation, but he didn’t end up completing it, finding that working from home was both too isolating and too distracting. He joined Ocean, with Gary Bracey’s memories of selling Pool and Steve Davis Snooker in his shop helping seal the deal. Lamb enjoyed the move to Manchester and making new friends among his fellow young new programmers. He also picked up Spectrum programming tips from some inspiring old hands like Joffa Smith and Jon Ritman (the latter on occasional visits, since he was freelance). His colleague Paul Hughes later remembered Lamb as being “a very serious chap, but another of those real geniuses that are so rare.”

Ocean initially threw Lamb onto their Top Gun game, a #20 hit in December 1986 which was not a highlight of his career. From there, Lamb worked on Arkanoid (#15, February 1987), which as a Taito conversion released by Imagine perhaps set him up perfectly to get the job of Renegade, despite the genre difference. His process of working on Renegade is well documented, because he wrote about its development for Sinclair User just after its release. The first challenge, as for many such arcade conversions, was getting to play it. Ocean did have a Renegade machine on site, but in this case the problem was its popularity making it hard for him to get a go. Eventually someone made a video of a playthrough and that served as an easier-to-access starting point.

“The first decision I made”, Mike Lamb wrote in that Sinclair User article, “was not to scroll the screen horizontally as the arcade version does. On the Spectrum this takes a lot of processing time and isn’t really essential to the game play. Leaving out the scrolling out also gave more freedom to Ron Fowles, the graphic artist, to design colourful backgrounds without getting attribute clashes.” That is, since the Spectrum only allows two different colours in each 8×8 block of pixels, knowing that the backgrounds wouldn’t need to move allowed them to be optimised within the constraints of those blocks.

Lamb needed to make further changes to get around memory constraints, particularly as he set himself a more difficult target than he had been given. “The brief allowed for two loads for the 48K version, but personally I don’t like multi-load arcade games” – he would make Renegade work a single load. He saved graphical memory by only storing the sprites facing to the right and using a look-up table to reflect them to the left as needed, and by sharing legs between all the characters; “The only graphics that suffered were the girls with whips in the red-light district”. He also used a particular sprite masking technique picked up from Jon Ritman. “This method is relatively slow but it had the advantage of not requiring a back screen, thus saving 4K of valuable RAM.”

The result was a game which was able to maintain much of the arcade game’s sense of anarchic roving brawls with multiple characters interacting, albeit in a simplified version which made the flying kick a little more overpowered. Even as Lamb told World of Spectrum his Ocean games were “mostly crap” with not enough time spent on gameplay, he said that “Renegade was OK because I was copying the arcade game’s gameplay”. “I think Renegade played to the strengths of the Spectrum and Amstrad in particular”, he later reflected. 

The home version of Renegade got some enthusiastic previews from the British games press. Sinclair User gleefully predicted controversy about it being “so violent it makes Rambo look like Adrian Mole” and suggested that it would be the ultimate kung-fu game with “none of that silly bowing ritual stuff, just thumping people”. The reviews of the Spectrum version followed through from that. For the same magazine, Phil South helpfully translated the game’s plot for British readers (“As he steps out of the local subway station, he soon realises what a plonker he is to venture onto this turf”), and then said that “the graphics are so slick you really feel like you’re part of an action movie rather than just playing a game.”

Graham Taylor in Sinclair User predicted that “this is going to sell zillions” and called it a “superb implementation of the arcade game”. He also wrote that “all this wanton violence would look like nothing were it not for the brilliant way the Spectrum’s graphical possibilities have been used to best effect to give a realistic impression of some complex moves – you’ll believe a sprite can hold its goolies and get nutted”. Crash wrote that “This just has to be the beat-’em-up to end them all, with its outstandingly detailed and colourful graphics, incredible playability and racy tune.”

Crash’s one complaint was that “the difficulty needs a little tweaking […] all the screens are really easy apart from the last.” They weren’t alone in that one, and Mike Lamb noted as much in that behind-the-scenes piece. “Renegade was finished in plenty of time for the release date […] we got feedback from the reviewers before the final version was sent for mastering.” He had thought that the fact he could get through the game without losing a life was because he’d had so much practice, but having found otherwise he said that he took the chance to adjust the difficulty upwards slightly. 

Another thing reviews were pleased with was the ease of the controls. Lamb described his decision-making there: “the arcade original had an 8 way joystick, a button to hit left, a button to hit right and a button to jump. That’s fine if you’ve got a joystick, but you’d need to be an octopus if you hadn’t!”. His simplified one-button control scheme made it a bit harder to switch directions quickly but was probably worth it. 

His colleagues on the Amstrad version (John Brandwood programming; Mark K. Jones on graphics) and Commodore 64 version (Max Taylor programming; Stephen Wahid and Jane Lowe on graphics) didn’t take the same approach, and combined joystick controls and keys for different attacks. It works fine on emulators, but less so at the time – as Commodore User wrote, “Unfortunately these keys are at the top of the keyboard and therefore nowhere near your joystick so you’re either going to have to practice a lot, buy a joystick that you can stick to the table or enlist a friend to move you as you deliver the killing blow”.

A preview of Renegade in the same magazine suggests that there were some deeper issues with the Commodore 64 version. Commodore User put the game in the context of Ocean’s staffing changes but took a sceptical approach. “Ocean are concerned to point out that although there have been a few problems in the past with lateness and quality, these problems are behind them. Much of the programming is being carried out in house by an ever-expanding team etc, etc. […] imagine my brain working rapidly to translate all this into real non-corporate terms. Something smells bovine.” This scepticism was because they turned up to play Renegade and got shown other games instead. “It turns out that the game was being put together outside only for the programmer to report back that they could only have half a game. Exit one programmer and it’s back to scratch.”

Its reviews were a bit less positive than the Spectrum one. ACE wrote that “Renegade on the C64 is not as exciting or polished as on other machines. Only having four sprites on the screen at any one time means you lose the sense that you’re fighting against huge odds.” “It could have been better I feel” wrote Mike Pattenden in Commodore User, who also said that the arcade Renegade had been his favourite “until someone with an even sicker sense of humour programmed that king of the goolie crunchers Double Dragon”, apparently oblivious to their shared creator. Computer & Video Games suggested that the C64 version of Renegade appeared to be “a rush job”. 

The reviews weren’t all bad. Ciarán Brennan in Zzap! 64 wrote that “arcade conversions appear to be improving all the time and this one is just about close to perfect”, even while acknowledging that the controls took a bit of getting used to. Julian Rignall in the same review wrote that “I’m amazed at how similar this is to the arcade version”. On the Amstrad version front, meanwhile, Computer & Video Games wrote that in contrast to the C64 one, it “has been programmed well and looks as if quite a bit of time has been spent on its production.” ACE called it “an extremely playable and addictive game, with some of the smoothest graphics ever seen on the Amstrad”.

Renegade did a pretty good job of validating Ocean’s new methods. Despite not having been as keenly competed to get hold of as some of their past hit arcade conversions, the home version of Renegade spent four weeks at UK #1, including returning to the top after being overtaken by Grand Prix Simulator. Happily for Ocean, they had signed up for more than just a one game deal for it, too. Just like Kunio-kun, Renegade would go on to star in sequels. If not the same sequels.

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Sources:

• Ocean: The History, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Keen, Retro Fusion Books, 2013
• Background Noise: Renegade, Mike Lamb, Sinclair User No. 68, November 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Kunio-kun, Kurt Kalata & Saikak, Hardcore Gaming 101, 2008, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• Kunio-kun – A Hot Blooded Famicom Pick ‘N’ Mix!, Games from the Black Hole, 2021
• The man who created Double Dragon, Matt Leone, Polygon, 2012
• Yoshihisa Kishimoto, honorary member of MO5.COM, MO5, 2011
• ‘Double Dragon’ Creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto Interview: A Retro Classic Returns, Huffington Post, 2014
• Interview with Mike Lamb, World of Spectrum, 1997
• Dev Story: Mike Lamb, Antstream Arcade, 2019
• Michael Lamb, Peter Ward, Retro GamesMaster, 2016
• Mike Lamb, Neil Reive, Arnold 2: Amstrad CPC – The Developers Q&As Uncut, 2021
• Ocean Software’s Central Street HQ, Jack Yarwood, Time Extension, 2023
• Paul Hughes, C64.com, 2009
• 8-bit-’em-ups, Retro Gamer No. 22, March 2006
• The Making of… Target: Renegade, Retro Gamer No. 25, May 2006
• Ultimate Guide: RoboCop, Rory Milne, Retro Gamer No. 240, December 2022
• Preview – Ocean Renegade, Sinclair User No. 62, May 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Arcade review – Renegade, Graham Taylor, Sinclair User No. 67, October 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing 
• Renegade, Phil South, Your Sinclair No. 22, October 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – Renegade, Crash No. 44, September 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing 
• Street fighting man, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 47, August 1987, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Games reviews – Renegade, T.H., Your Commodore No. 39, December 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Renegade, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 49, October 1987, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack 
• Zzap! Test – Renegade, Zzap! 64 No. 31, November 1987, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Screen Test Updates – Renegade, ACE No. 2, November 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Renegade, Computer & Video Games No. 73, November 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Test – Renegade, ACE No. 1, October 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive

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