Tiger Road

Lore & Background

In Tiger Road, the player controls Lee Whong, a master of the Tiger Technique of Oh-Lin. The game's plot involves the abduction of children from Oh-Lin by minions of the Dragon God Ryuken, a warlord who seeks to conquer China. The player must advance through five stages, retrieve scrolls in training areas to gain health and weapon upgrades, and obtain the Double-Headed Tiger Fighting Technique (Tora Kikoh) to defeat Ryuken and rescue the children held at the temple of Ryugado.

Reader's Guide

Tiger Road holds significance as a Capcom arcade title from the late 1980s that exemplifies the hack and slash platform genre. Its regional differences are noteworthy: the Japanese arcade release included additional sound hardware for digital voice samples and required the game to be completed twice to see the ending, while international releases removed this hardware and allowed completion in a single playthrough. The game was ported to multiple home computer systems in Europe by U.S. Gold and in North America by Capcom, with a remade version for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 in 1990. It was later included in the compilation Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. In Japan, it was listed as the eighth most-successful table arcade unit in January 1988, and it received a 4 out of 5 star review in Dragon #156.

Did You Know?

• The Japanese arcade release of Tiger Road had additional sound hardware (Z80 and MSM5205 chip) for digital voice samples.
• The international version removed the extra sound hardware and required only one playthrough to see the ending, while the Japanese version required two.
• The game was reviewed in Dragon #156 (1990) and given 4 out of 5 stars.