After the War (video game)

Lore & Background

After the War takes place in 2019 in Manhattan after a nuclear war. The player controls Jonathan Rogers, known as "Jungle" Rogers, whose mission is to reach launch platform XV-238 at the control base of the schizophrenic assassin Professor McJerin and escape to outer colonies. The game is structured into two parts: the first is a side-scrolling beat 'em up set in the streets, where the player fights minor enemies and bosses to find the entrance to the city's underground rail transport. After completing this act, the player enters their name on a high score board and receives a password to continue. The second act shifts to a shoot 'em up style set in tunnels and stations, with larger, tougher enemies and more complex designs.

Reader's Guide

After the War is significant as a late-1980s example of genre-blending in video games, combining beat 'em up and shoot 'em up mechanics within a single title. Its development involved notable Spanish artists: Luis Royo created the final cover art after Alfonso Azpiri, whose brother Jorge contributed graphics for the Amstrad CPC version, ended his collaboration with Dinamic. The game utilized Dinamic's proprietary "FX brands," including FX Double Load (two-part loading to manage memory) and FX Giant Sprites (large sprites composed of reusable parts, sometimes revealing vertical sync issues). Versions varied across platforms, with some 16-bit ports featuring digitized voices and the Amstrad CPC version using both mode 0 and mode 1 graphics. A coin-op version was reportedly playable at the Parque de Atracciones de Madrid years before the worldwide home release, though never released outside Spain. In 2011, former Dinamic members acquired rights to distribute the Windows game Collapse under the name After the War, marketing it as part of the same fictional universe.

Did You Know?

• The game's city is never named in the game itself, but promotional and unreleased artwork by Luis Royo and Alfonso Azpiri suggests it is a post-nuclear New York City.
• The FX Giant Sprites trick reused small sprite parts across characters, so many enemies share the same trouser and leg animations.
• A coin-op version of the game was playable at the Parque de Atracciones de Madrid years before the worldwide home release, but was never released outside Spain.
• The game's cover art was originally drawn by Alfonso Azpiri, but due to his departure from Dinamic, new cover art was commissioned to Luis Royo.

Genre Identity: What Makes a Brawler a Brawler

After the War belongs to a family of action titles defined by one core promise: you walk forward, and you punch everything in your path. In a beat 'em up, the player character battles waves of opponents using bare fists or melee weapons, progressing through a level one segment at a time before confronting a tougher boss at the far end. This structure sets the genre apart from one-on-one fighting games, which center on isolated duels rather than continuous scrolling encounters. The distinction, however, has never been perfectly clean. British gaming magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, including Mean Machines and C+VG, lumped both scrolling brawlers and arena fighters under the umbrella term 'beat 'em up,' differentiating them only with prefixes like 'scrolling' versus 'one on one.' That loose usage persisted in UK press well into the late 1990s. What unites the genre regardless of terminology is its arcade-born philosophy: controls are deliberately minimal so anyone can pick up a controller, yet the depth of the combat system rewards hours of practice. That tension between accessibility and mastery remains the beating heart of every brawler, and it is the design DNA that After the War inherits.

A Lineage Forged in Arcade Cabinets

The brawler genre traces its roots to 1984, when Irem released Kung-Fu Master, a title inspired by Hong Kong martial arts cinema. Two years later, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun established the horizontal belt-scroll format that would become the genre's visual signature, while its Western release, Renegade, cemented the underworld-revenge narrative. The true golden era arrived with Double Dragon in 1987, which locked in two-player cooperative play and the continuous scrolling structure that define classic brawlers. That era produced an extraordinary run of titles—Streets of Rage, Final Fight, Golden Axe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game—before Street Fighter II in 1991 pulled players' attention toward one-on-one combat. The late 1990s brought a downturn as 3D polygon technology reshaped the industry. Yet the formula never died. The 2000s saw a 3D hack-and-slash offshoot with God of War, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta, and the 2010s triggered a genuine 2D revival through Streets of Rage 4, Dragon's Crown, and Shredder's Revenge. After the War sits within this long, evolving chain of influence.

Combat Architecture: The Mechanics of the Brawl

The gameplay loop of a beat 'em up is deceptively simple: advance across a horizontally scrolling stage, defeat each cluster of enemies you encounter, and survive to the boss. Levels are built from repeated enemy groups, creating a rhythm of combat that rewards pattern recognition. Players can pick up weapons and health-restoring power-ups along the way, adding a layer of resource management to the constant brawling. Character selection is a hallmark of the genre; each protagonist carries a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and special moves, meaning the strategy shifts depending on who you choose. The combat vocabulary typically includes rapid combo strings, jumping attacks, and grappling moves, all executed through a control scheme that often requires nothing more than two attack buttons. Since Double Dragon, cooperative two-player play has been a defining feature, and brawlers are notably more likely to support local co-op than most other action genres. After the War draws on all of these mechanical pillars, delivering the genre's signature blend of straightforward inputs and deep, layered fighting.

The 2D and 3D Divide: Structural Variations

Within the broad brawler category, structural format creates meaningful sub-genres. The earliest and most traditional style is the single-plane side-scrolling beat 'em up, where motion is locked to one horizontal axis. Kung-Fu Master established this in 1984, and it was carried forward by titles like My Hero, Flashgal, The Ninja Warriors, Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja, and Splatterhouse. This format sits within a wider family of side-scrolling character action games that also includes 2D fighters, platformers, and run-and-gun shooters. Later entries in the genre abandoned the strict 2D scroll in favor of larger three-dimensional arenas where players can roam freely, though they retained the genre's signature easy-to-learn control systems and wave-based enemy encounters. The 2000s hack-and-slash wave—God Hand, Dynasty Warriors, Bayonetta—pushed this 3D adaptation to its most ambitious scale. Meanwhile, the 2010s saw a deliberate return to the classic 2D scrolling format, proving that the original structure still resonates. After the War's design choices place it within this ongoing dialogue between the genre's two-dimensional heritage and its three-dimensional experiments.

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