One of the most beloved games on the Nintendo Entertainment System was River City Ransom, a game that managed to combine the action of a beat’em up with many RPG elements seamlessly. The game, originally known in Japan as Downtown Hot-Blooded Story and later known in PAL regions as simply Street Gangs, was the third entry in Technos’ Kunio-Kun series.

The Kunio-Kun series began 30 years ago with the 1986 release of Renegade, which introduced the titular character, a high school student who gets himself into various tricky scenarios and usually has to fight out of them with his pal Riki. Besides the various beat’em up side-scrolling action entries, the Kunio-Kun series also has a number of sports entries, such as dodgeball, soccer and volleyball games.

The western releases of these games have all generally featured heavily Americanized elements making it difficult for some US audiences to tell that all of these games are all in the same series. A large part of the problem is that the series’ rights have never been consistently maintained by one company, leading to various creative changes by the different western publishers; Kunio himself has variously been known in America as Mr. K, Sam, Alex, and Crash Cooney.

River City Ransom has maintained a strong following over the years, though, thanks largely to the non-linear gameplay combined with enough of a challenge to keep things interesting. The game follows Alex and Ryan (Kunio and Riki) as they travel across town to rescue Ryan’s girlfriend from the villainous Slick, who kidnapped her. As they work their way to River City High School to take him down, they must defeat the leaders of the various gangs – which all have names like The Jocks, The Squids, or even The Generic Dudes.

The game has proved to be so popular over the years that it’s received numerous ports and remakes. It’s been remade twice, once for the Game Boy Advance, and most recently for the Nintendo 3DS, with the latter adding a number of additions as well. An independently-developed, officially-licensed sequel to the game was also successfully Kickstarted, and will be called River City Ransom Underground.