Rejoice, fellow lovers of obscure video games of the early '90s! Developer Hamster Corporation's Arcade Archives series has just brought us one heck of a historical curiosity in Namco's Knuckle Heads.
Knuckle Heads hit Japanese arcades in 1993, just as the Street Fighter 2-inspired fever for 2D fighting games was starting to hit its peak. This was Namco's first fighting game, and it served as the company's first tentative dip into the genre years before Tekken would become a breakout hit in the 3D fighting world. While Knuckle Heads seems to have enjoyed modest success in Japan, it never got a worldwide release until now.
If you want to check out Knuckle Heads for yourself, it's available today as part of the Arcade Archives series on both Switch and PlayStation. It's priced at a cool $7.99 or $8.49 USD depending on your platform of choice, which is probably a whole lot less than the amount in quarters you would've spent on it back in the day.
The big gimmick in Knuckle Heads is the four-person multiplayer mode, which is just as chaotic as you'd expect in a Street Fighter-style 2D fighter, with a gaggle of brawlers fighting along multiple planes in a constrained arena. It looks like it nearly matches the chaos levels of something like Super Smash Bros. - though, of course, this was several years before that formula was established on N64.
But Knuckle Heads' most surprising feature for me is its absurdly stacked voice cast. The roster only has six characters, but those characters are voiced by some of the most notable anime actors of the '80s and '90s, including Nobuo Tobita (Gundam's Kamille Bidan), Toshiyuki Morikawa (Berserk's Griffith, plus a whole host of appearances as Final Fantasy's Sephiroth), and Megumi Hayashibara (Neon Genesis Evangelion's Rei Ayanmi, Cowboy Bebop's Faye Valentine, Ranma 1/2's Ranma, and Hello Kitty's Hello Kitty.) That's some serious star power for a certain generation of anime fans - namely mine.
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