Golden Axe – Developing a Classic

What do you get when you mix Conan the Barbarian, Double Dragon, Dragon Quest, and a developer who was unsatisfied with his previous game? The Sega classic, Golden Axe.

I’m not sure when I first played Golden Axe, but I’m fairly certain it was in the arcade before I played it on the Sega Genesis. The arcade game was everywhere in the early 90’s, and it was easy to stumble across one at an arcade, a gas station, or a movie theater. What I do remember is being in awe of the game and how it felt like a movie in my 11 year old mind. The enemies were well designed, the gameplay was great, and the magic spells…oh man…some of those special effects blew me away.

But how did an unsatisfied game developer bring together ideas from many separate IPs and create a classic beat ’em up? Let’s dive in.

Altered Beast Hangover

Makoto Uchida and his team at Sega had launched Altered Beast in 1988. (I covered the development of Altered Beast in a previous post.) While it did well commercially, Uchida was not satisfied with the final product. In the 11th hour of development, the team had to scrap major gameplay mechanics due to technical issues. Altered Beast launched with spectacular graphics that blew audiences away, but the controls were lackluster at best. “As a result, players got tired of the game relatively soon,”¹ Uchida would later say.

As development of Altered Beast was wrapping up, Sega asked Uchida to come up with a game with similar gameplay to Techno’s Double Dragon², which was big in arcades and had ported to the NES in 1988.

Golden Axe Inspiration

“My idea was to come up with a Double Dragon that was not a Double Dragon,”² said Uchida.

Looking for inspiration, Uchida turned once again to movies. Altered Beast had been inspired by Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the movie The Howling. For this follow-up game, he drew inspiration from Conan the Barbarian. The 1982 film featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as a powerful warrior avenging his people. Uchida based The Barbarian, named Ax Battler, in the game off of Schwarzenegger’s character and set the world of the game in a similar fantasy world as the movie. However, inspiration didn’t stop there.

“I had a feeling that arcade games should be competitive against the great hit console title Dragon Quest.”²

Dragon Quest, or Dragon Warrior as it was known in North America, was hugely popular on the Famicon/NES, especially in Japan. The game featured a warrior, magic spells, a slew of different enemies (including dragons, of course), and a vibrant land to traverse. Drawing inspiration from this source, Uchida pulled in the concept of players being able to use magic during the game, and more fantasy elements, such as dragons.

Even more inspiration came from Tolkien. “Of course I was also inspired by Lord Of The Rings. I bought many illustration works based on Middle-Earth and used them as reference materials. If I could, I would vote Gandalf for president!”² Uchida would go on to say. The Tolkien influence brought in the concept of playing as a Dwarf, Gilius Thunderhead, who came from the mines of Wolud (pretty Tolkien-esque if you ask me.) Gilius would have strong melee attacks, but have weaker magic abilities than the barbarian.

Finally, stories of the Amazon women and the character Valeria from Conan the Barbarian inspired the female protagonist, Tyris Flare, who wielded more magical ability than the other two main characters but was slightly weaker with her attacks.

For the look of the game and characters, Uchida was heavily influenced by fantasy artist Boris Vallejo.⁴

Getting Golden Axe’s Gameplay Just Right

The gameplay of Double Dragon allowed characters to not only move linearly, like in Altered Beast, but also moving side to side in the depth of the environment. Known as 2.5D (2D views with some depth added), this allowed enemies to be not only ahead or behind the player, but toward the top or bottom of the screen as well. Uchida and Shinobi Team needed to match or beat Double Dragon’s gameplay. In their previous outing with Altered Beast, the controls fell flat. Now, Uchida and the team had a second chance to get the controls correct from the beginning.

One of the first things the team focused on, which had been left out of Altered Beast, was simultaneous two-player action. But the team immediately faced limitations. They were building the game on Sega System 16b hardware, which had also been used for Altered Beast. The hardware had a hard limit of only being able to display and control six total characters (both player controlled and computer controlled) on screen at a time .² The team worked around these limitations, crafting encounters with enemies to be manageable by the system while ensuring players were still challenged, even if two were playing at once.

The game would also be in 2.5D, just like Double Dragon. This gave the game actual depth when it came to fighting, and allowed players to move away from oncoming attacks.

Simple, Yet Complex Controls

The team had wanted pressure-sensitive buttons for Altered Beast, but that technology was simply too expensive to put in an arcade cabinet. Knowing that wasn’t an option from the beginning for Golden Axe, the team worked on ways to make the three buttons on the arcade do more than three things.

The default buttons were attack, jump, and magic, but doing combinations of the buttons or doing them in certain orders would create new attacks. Jumping and then attacking would create a powerful jump attack. Tapping the joystick in a direction twice would send the hero running forward and pressing attack during the run would result in a running attack, such as a headbutt, sending enemies to the ground. Pressing jump and attack at the same time would result in an special attack that would hit behind the player, which came in very handy when a player found themselves surrounded by enemies.

Players would also find that if they were close enough to an enemy, their hero would change up their moves, usually knocking the village to their knees and then picking them up and throwing them.

The game also introduced something that hadn’t been seen in beat ’em ups yet and would completely differentiate it from Double Dragon: perpetual weapons.

Other games had weapons you could pick up, like an occasional baseball bat, but in Golden Axe, you always had your sword or axe. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like an issue, but when there is limited room on the screen and characters are big enough to see all of their detail, issues soon arise.

“Now, if we want the character to permanently hold a weapon in a side-view game while maintaining the size of the character, the character will have an enormous reach and will become too strong,”² Uchida explained. “We adjusted the swing so the characters could not attack too far. We had to draw the playable character small, but instead we made the boss enemies and magic [effects] huge…”

This gave the game the right balance between being visually stunning and not overly easy for players. And speaking of that magic…

It’s Magic…You Know…

Knowing that arcade games were now going up against other genres, such as role playing games like Dragon Quest, Uchida wanted to incorporate magic into the game. But he and the team didn’t go for simple spells or Magic Missiles. Instead, they wanted showstoppers like they had with the character transformations in Altered Beast. The magic abilities were just the thing to to wow players.

Each character could build up their magic potential by grabbing magic potions in the level. As their magic reserves increased, so did their potential power. If the player found themselves in a pinch and needed to, they could release their magic, which would fill the screen with an animation that ranged from Ax Battler’s mini mushroom clouds, to Gilius’s lightning bolts, to Tyris’s full screen dragon attack.

With the basic controls looking good, Uchida had one more trick up his sleave.

Beast Mode

A senior artist was painting assets for the game that would later become digitized by programmers. Uchida saw one of the artist’s paintings of an enemy and had an idea. “A character was riding on a monster using a saddle. I saw it, and thought we could use this in the game.”²

Instead of just having the enemies ride the beasts, players could also take control of them. The team came up with three separate dragons that players could ride, each with their own attacks. Another beast came as an homage to the team’s previous game. Lovingly called “Chicken Leg”, this iconic bird/lizard was originally an enemy in Altered Beast, but was now a rideable character that swings its tail to attack.

Golden Axe Play Testing

It wasn’t enough to just have the development team test things out. Uchida wasn’t going to fall into the trap of Altered Beast again and ship with shallow gameplay. He got 100 different Sega employees to test the game and give their feedback.

He recorded the play log and stood behind each of them as they played. Then, he performed a statistical analysis of the gameplay to ensure it was as good as it could be.⁴ This focus on the gameplay would end up paying off considerably for Uchida and Sega.

It Wasn’t Always Golden Axe

Golden Axe started development under the title Battle Axe.² It was a name that the team liked, but it soon got dropped due to licensing issues where it could not be used. So the team switched up the English name to Broad Axe, which was still similar to the Japanese name. Broad Axe was the name of the game for the majority of its development all the way up until Sega Enterprises President Tom Petit saw the game.

Petit noticed Gilius’ axe and thought it looked golden. He made the suggestion that the game should be called Golden Axe. Uchida and the Shinobi team did not like it. “We didn’t like the name because it had no relations with the Japanese, but we were threatened that he would not sell the game if the title name was not ‘Golden Axe’ and so we changed the title name.”²

The Story

Uchida had leaned on Greek Mythology when creating Altered Beast, and this time around he leaned heavily into the fantasy genre.

The basic premise of the story was that the evil Death Adder has captured the King and his daughter and wants to rule the kingdom of Yuria. The three main characters all have one sentence backgrounds of their beefs with Death Adder (Gilius’ twin brother was killed by Death Adder’s soldiers, Ax Battler lost his mother to Death Adder and Tyris lost both of her parents to the antagonist.) It’s not exactly Tolkien, but it at least gives the characters some motivation to set out on the quest.

In the Sega Genesis port, a bit more story was added in the user manual. It also includes a mention that Death Adder, in addition to kidnapping the King and his daughter, also took the “Golden Axe.” What is the “Golden Axe?” We don’t know. But apparently it’s important. (In later iterations and sequels, the “Golden Axe” was given more importance and is a mythical object that protects the kingdom, and in one iteration makes the bearer immortal.)

Building the World

With gameplay, characters and the story down, Uchida and Shinobi team set out to make fantastic set pieces in which the story could take place. The backgrounds and levels are detailed and rich. Two of the most famous levels are Turtle Village, which takes place on the back of a giant sea turtle, and Friend’s Path, which takes place on the back of an eagle.

The team created 5 distinct locations, each with their own look and feel, featuring villages, forests, giant animals, and castles. Townspeople are featured throughout the story, usually being mistreated by the forces of Death Adder, and you get to save them.

The other addition to the game were bonus rounds between levels, where little thieves show up at your camp site while you’re sleeping and steal your magic potions. By attacking them, you get back your potions and more. If you fail to catch and attack them, you lose whatever potions they took when you start the next level.

Golden Axe Release and Reception

Golden Axe released in Japan on January 27, 1989 and then worldwide in May 1989. The reviews were positive overall with Computer and Video Games calling it, “Another winner from Sega, and one which seems to be exceeding[ly] popular at the moment.”⁵ The Games Machine Magazine praised it versus other beat ’em ups at the time saying it was their “favorite partly because of the attention to the little graphical details…and partly because I’m a sucker for a good sword ‘n’ sorcery tale.”⁶

The gameplay that Uchida and the team worked so hard on getting right paid off. On one occasion, Uchida watched two children at a testing location in Japan pump quarters in the game. The kids were set on defeating the evil Death Adder at the end of the game. Uchida witnessed their tenacity in trying to beat the game and their celebration when it finally happened. It became one of the more rewarding moments in his career.⁴

Golden Axe would go on to be a smash hit. It became one of the top grossing arcade games in the US in early 1990, and was also a top 20 arcade in Japan.³

The game would get ported to the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in late 1989 and also receive rave reviews. The Genesis version even had an extra final boss. After defeating Death Adder, players would have to fight a tougher, palette swapped version of Death Adder, named Death Bringer.

Closing the Altered Beast Chapter

After the spectacle that was Altered Beast, Uchida and Shinobi Team now had a true hit on their hands. They delivered a quality game with a wow factor and most importantly, solid gameplay.

Golden Axe truly pushed the beat ’em up genre forward, and soon found an arcade rival in Final Fight, which launched in November of 1989. While Golden Axe’s gameplay would become eclipsed later by other great beat ’em ups, such as Streets of Rage, it’s hard not to see how it influenced those games (in Streets of Rage, instead of magic, you get a special move where the police car fires a flaming projectile, and you can also pick up and throw villains).

After the success of Golden Axe, Uchida’s feelings about Sega’s last-minute pivot from Broad Sword to Golden Axe also changed.

“I now think it was good that we had changed the name [to Golden Axe] and I appreciate his [Petit’s] advice.”

References:

1. The Making of Altered Beast: Retro Gamer No. 124
2. The Making of Golden Axe: Retro Gamer, No. 128
3. Golden Axe Wikipedia Page
4. Horwitz, 2018, The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games, McFarland
5. Computer and Video Games Magazine Issue 093
6. The Games Machine Magazine Issue 22