Combining historical and intertextual research with an analytical framework based on game studies and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory (1991, 1995), I argue that the classical beat ‘em up games that were produced in Japan carried out at a local level a function of symbolic appropriation and redistribution, because they remediated a cinematic textual canon (which was for a significant part of foreign origin) into the video game medium. The instantiations of the “street violence” discourse offered by Hollywood cinema provided the Japanese designers with a framework rich in aesthetic, narrative and even motivational elements to be appropriated in order to shape the massive and reiterated physical violence that was performed in their games. I argue that the evolution of this Japanese genre, marked by such milestones as Nekketsu kōha Kunio-kun (Technōs Japan 1986) and Double Dragon (Technōs Japan 1987), was intertwined with a process of negotiation with this international canon. In particular, for its design and narrative tropes, Final Fight inherited and incorporated a number of elements coming from the Hollywood action cinema that had been translated into the newer digital medium of video game. This canon comprised texts produced within the same medium (i.e., other video games, mostly of Japanese production), but also drew from an intermedial corpus. Final Fight did not found the beat ‘em up genre by itself: it was in fact produced having on the background a specific, however recent, textual tradition and canon. The streets depicted in this genre, appearing as a nearly mythological place where the heroes crush legions of foes in a sort of vigilante-like fantasy, are characterized as corrupted and degraded in compliance with representations of “street violence” in big American cities that were articulated in popular gang movies, such as The Warriors and Streets of Fire, and vigilante movies, such as Death Wish and Dirty Harry. Playing the (International) Movie: Intermediality and the Appropriation of Symbolic Capital in Final Fight and the Beat ‘em up Genre Final Fight (Capcom 1989) is considered one of the most accomplished examples of “beat ‘em up,” a digital game genre that rose to international popularity in the second half of the 1980s. It is in this context that Nakazawa Shin’ichi, in 1984, wrote one of the first academic texts in Japanese on video games, which was about a very influential arcade title of that period called Xevious (Namco, 1983). For many people, video games were a problem. Arcades were spoken of as hotbeds of delinquency and home video games as sneaky devices shifting children’s focus away from school and social interactions (Katou, 2011, p. Indeed, critics became wary of the negative effects of video games and, around 1985, a feeling of uneasiness towards this new form of entertainment started to spread across Japanese media (Sakamoto, qtd. However, the suddenness of this invasion in the fabric of everyday life was not without triggering some concerns. Such games made computer role playing games accessible to a wider demographic than the small circles of personal computer enthusiasts. It also allowed them to embark on longer video game adventures with the release of RPGs such as Dragon Quest (Enix, 1986). On the home front, not only had Nintendo’s Family Computer democratized the pleasures of digital entertainment, but it allowed people to play games from arcades comfortably at home. Those venues saw a rapid influx of new coin-operated video games that were ever more sophisticated and engaging than before. This change first took hold in the large network of arcade parlors that were established all over the country, which was a result of the craze of Space Invaders in the summer of 1978 (Taito). In the 1980s, Japanese habits were being drastically transformed by the integration of video games in the entertainment industry.
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