Death Wish
Game
2 documents in the library are about Death Wish, from writers such as DiGRA and Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Death Wish, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Death Wish
Between Punches and Flying Attacks: Ludonarrative Imaginaries in 1980s Beat 'em Up Games
This paper examines how 1980s beat 'em up video games drew on the social and cultural imaginaries of their era, particularly anxieties about urban violence in major American cities, and how intermedial ties to Hollywood cinema shaped their themes and design.
- The paper argues that 1980s beat 'em up games such as Renegade, Double Dragon, Final Fight, and Streets of Rage emerged from a feedback loop between lived social conditions and mediated representations, not as accidental products of a popular genre.
- The genre's origin is traced to Renegade (1986), which launched a series that grew to more than fifty releases across platforms.
- New York City recorded its highest number of criminal incidents in 1980, with a homicide rate roughly three times that of 2020, and these figures did not begin declining until the early 1990s.
Playing the (International) Movie: Intermediality and the Appropriation of Symbolic Capital in Final Fight and the Beat 'em up Genre
Zanotti's article examines how Japanese beat 'em up video games of the 1980s, most prominently Final Fight (Capcom, 1989), remediated the conventions of American urban vigilante and gang cinema into interactive form.
- Zanotti argues that Japanese beat 'em up games of the 1980s, led by Capcom's Final Fight (1989), remediated American urban vigilante and gang films into interactive form, appropriating Hollywood's symbolic capital to achieve international success few other Japanese cultural sectors matched that decade.
- Films such as Death Wish, Dirty Harry, The Warriors, and Streets of Fire supplied the genre's narrative and moral framework, in which a lone hero restores personal rather than systemic order through endless street brawls.
- The article traces the genre across 1980s and early 1990s arcade titles from Capcom, Data East, Irem, Konami, Technōs Japan, and SNK, contrasting them with earlier martial-arts fighters like Karate Champ and Urban Champion that lacked the urban vigilante framing.