Knuckle Bash

1993 · Beat 'em up · Arcade

About Knuckle Bash

Knuckle Bash (1993) is Toaplan's rare beat 'em up in which renegade pro wrestlers, including a luchador and an Elvis lookalike, take down a corrupt wrestling organisation, one of the few Toaplan games never ported at the time.

Knuckle Bash in Depth

A side-scrolling beat 'em up in the mould of Final Fight and Double Dragon, it sends wrestlers across ten stages in different locations to defeat the Mad Bull Group. At the start, players choose one of two scenarios, each with its own stages, and clearing certain scenarios unlocks an extra character. Unusually for the genre, stages consist mainly of waves of one or a few strong, boss-like enemies rather than long streams of weaker ones, and there are no weapons or objects to pick up at all. As in Streets of Rage 2, each character has a special attack that damages every enemy on screen, and between stages a minigame recalls Mortal Kombat's "Test Your Might".

The Mad Bull Group is a corrupt wrestling organisation tainting a sport whose wrestlers children look up to. Three former members, branded traitors for deserting, meet secretly at a Chicago hotel to contact a "Ninpow" master also wanted by the group, and venture into its Battle Kingdom headquarters. The roster is El Plancha, a luchador; Michael Sobut, an Elvis Presley lookalike; Jack Brow, a street fighter; Mr. Hayate, a ninja master of Ninpow; and Captain, an American football player who defects from the Mad Bull Group.

Making Knuckle Bash

It was made by largely the same Toaplan staff who would move to its offshoots after the company's 1994 bankruptcy, and Tatsuya Uemura, who said he was not involved, recounted that the planned fighting game drifted into a beat 'em up. Shown at the 1993 AOU Show, it was released in arcades worldwide that year by Toaplan and, in North America and Europe, Atari Games. Play Meter listed it as the 27th most popular arcade game of July 1993. Computer+Videogiochi noted its mix of Final Fight-style play and wrestling, Hardcore Gaming 101 said it "might not be fantastic, but it gets by on being an average beat em up that is just ridiculous enough to make it enjoyable", Retro Gamer was mixed and Wireframe called it "a rare foray into brawler territory" for Toaplan. Inoue went on to work at the offshoot Gazelle on 1995's Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon. Its rights now belong to Tatsujin, founded by Yuge in 2017.

Knuckle Bash Trivia

Toaplan originally commissioned the team to make a fighting game like Street Fighter II.
Junya Inoue designed it, with Nanpei Kaneko, who had worked on FixEight.
Masahiro Yuge and Osamu Ōta composed the music.
A bootleg, Knuckle Bash 2, appeared in 1999.
Its first official console release came on the Evercade's Toaplan Arcade 4 cartridge in December 2024.