How 'Streets Of Rage 4' Reimagined Gaming's Most Iconic Rave

Axel Stone and friends return to clean up the streets once again in Streets of Rage 4. LizardCube hide caption Axel Stone and friends return to clean up the streets once again in Streets of Rage 4. At the turn of the '90s, the attention of the video game industry was locked onto two major companies battling for the lion's share of a growing industry. One was Nintendo, whose ubiquitous Italian plumber was a household name. The other was SEGA, a brand known for its spiky hedgehog, sure, but also for signaling a specific kind of '90s cool that set itself against other video games of the time. While Nintendo stuck to their family friendly "games-for-all" aesthetic, SEGA put out video games that were thematically riskier and more mature. One of SEGA's biggest titles of that era was Streets of Rage, a beat-'em-up style game released for the Genesis console in 1991.