Dotemu, Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games · PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch · 2020 · Inspired by: Streets of Rage 1–3 (Sega Genesis)
A sequel arriving twenty-six years after Streets of Rage 3, built by three small European studios on a licence Sega granted them — and made by a core team of roughly five people.
Streets of Rage 4 exists because of an aborted plan. After finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, Lizardcube artist Ben Fiquet wanted to remaster the original Streets of Rage games, but the programmer he needed had moved on to a personal project. Rather than abandon the idea, Fiquet and publisher Dotemu approached Sega with a larger proposal: not a remaster but a genuine sequel to a trilogy that had been dormant since 1994. Sega agreed and licensed the franchise, and production began at the start of 2018. The execution was collaborative and small. Dotemu, Lizardcube, and Guard Crush Games co-developed, with Guard Crush contributing a modified version of the engine from its own game Streets of Fury — meaning the beat-'em-up technology underpinning an official Sega sequel came from an independent studio's prior project. The core development team numbered around five people across the three companies. What they produced in 2020 was a continuation rather than a nostalgia exercise: Lizardcube's hand-drawn art replaced the pixel work entirely, the combat added modern systems, and the result was received as a legitimate fourth entry in a series whose last instalment predated most of its new audience.
Sega's decision here is the structurally interesting part. Streets of Rage is not a minor property — it is one of the defining series of the Genesis era and a pillar of the company's 16-bit identity. Handing it to Dotemu, Lizardcube, and Guard Crush, three small European studios with a combined headcount that would not fill a meeting room at a major publisher, was a bet that enthusiasm and specific expertise mattered more than scale.
It is the same bet Sega made with Christian Whitehead and Sonic Mania, and it worked for the same reason. A beat-'em-up is a genre with precise, unfashionable requirements — hit feedback, crowd management, the exact weight of a punch — that a large studio without genre veterans would have to rediscover from scratch. Guard Crush had already built the technology on Streets of Fury; Lizardcube had already proven its art and its reverence on Wonder Boy. Sega was not taking a risk on unknowns so much as recognising that the relevant skills now lived outside the building.
A core team of about five, producing a sequel to a beloved trilogy after a twenty-six-year gap, is a proposition that would have been dismissed as fantasy in most eras of the industry. It was viable in 2018 for concrete reasons: the engine existed already, digital distribution removed the manufacturing and retail barriers that once made small releases uneconomic, and the scope of a beat-'em-up is bounded in a way that an open-world game's is not. Constraints that once made a genre look obsolete turned out to make it perfectly suited to a small team.
The gap itself did real work. Twenty-six years meant there was no institutional expectation to satisfy and no recent entry to be measured against — the developers were answering to memory rather than to a predecessor anyone had played lately. That freed them to rebuild the art entirely in Lizardcube's hand-drawn style rather than performing pixel-art nostalgia, and to modernise the combat rather than reproducing 1994's. The result is a sequel that feels continuous with the trilogy without imitating it, which is a far harder thing to achieve than a faithful remaster and a considerably better argument for the series still being alive.