Rejoice, lovers of obscure early 90s video games! The Arcade Archives series from developer Hamster Corporation has just given us an incredible historical curiosity in the form of Namco’s Knuckle Heads.
Knuckle Heads hit Japanese arcades in 1993, just as the Street Fighter 2-inspired 2D fighting game fever was at its peak. This was Namco’s first fighting game, and it was the company’s first tentative foray into the genre, years before Tekken became the big hit in the 3D fighting world. While Knuckle Heads seems to have modest success in Japan, it was never released worldwide until now.
If you want to try Knuckle Heads for yourself, it’s available today as part of the Arcade Archives series on both Switch and PlayStation. It costs a cool $7.99 or $8.49 depending on your chosen platform, which is probably a lot less than the amount you would have spent on it in quarters back in the day.
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The big gimmick in Knuckle Heads is the four-person multiplayer mode, which is every bit as chaotic as you’d expect from a 2D Street Fighter-style fighter, with a bevy of brawlers battling on multiple levels in a confined arena. It looks like it’s almost reaching the levels of chaos of something like Super Smash Bros. – though of course that was several years before that formula was established on N64.
But the most surprising feature of Knuckle Heads for me is its absurdly wide range of voices. The roster is only six characters, but those characters are voiced by some of the most well-known anime actors of the ’80s and ’90s, including Nobuo Tobita (Kamille Bidan from Gundam), Toshiyuki Morikawa (Griffith from Berserk, plus a whole host of appearances as Sephiroth from Final Fantasy), and Megumi Hayashibara (Rei Ayanmi from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, Ranma from Ranma 1/2, and Hello Kitty from Hello Kitty). That’s a lot of star power for a certain generation of anime fans—namely, mine.
Get your knuckles dusted with the best fighting games you can play.
