How Streets of Rage 4 Will Change Everything
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2018-08-31

Please excuse the clickbait title - How Streets of Rage Will Change Sega's Relationship With Professional Third Party Fan Developers just doesn't have as much pizzazz.

The Lizardcube/Dragon's Trap video mentioned in this video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buKg9hs7AA8

Streets of Rage 4 is an exciting prospect. After proving themselves capable of revitalising classic Sega games with Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, Lizardcube (led by Omar Cornut and Ben Fiquet) are now doing something even more exciting by making a sequel to a classic game.

If we take both The Dragon's Trap and Sonic Mania as two examples of Sega working more closely with fans-turned-pro developers, then Streets of Rage 4 offers us the next logical step.

The Dragon's Trap and Sonic Mania are essentially both fan remixes. Reworked, polished, given new paint jobs. But neither game was given full reign to explore new ideas and concepts. Sure, there's some of that in Mania, but its primary purpose is to give a fan take on classic Sonic stages.

This was a deliberate choice on the part of Takashi Iizuka, the Sonic Team overseer for Mania. The devs wanted to make a wholly original game, but Sega said no, they should do a remix instead.

Now, though, Sega is trusting a precious IP to Lizardcube. The company proved its worth with The Dragon's Trap, so now they get to do more than simply remix Streets of Rage; they get to make a whole new game in the classic series.

This bodes well for the future. We're excited to see what comes next.

Apologies for just a short video this week - as the endslate notes, we're working on a really big project at the moment which should hopefully be ready in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of an experiment, so we don't know how it'll be received, but for anyone who's wanted to see a longer video from us, this is your chance!

It's all about piracy, copyright, and ROMs. It also tackled a lot of history, both of gaming, and of other art forms across history. Get ready to LEARN!

Anyway, hopefully that'll be ready soon. If you'd like to support us, please do consider donating to our Patreon (http://patreon.com/videogamestorytime).

Lots of love,

BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstripes) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Title music by Tee Lopes (http://twitter.com/teelopesmusic)

Incidental music: Dewdrop Fantasy by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/