Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is a fighting video game developed and originally published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in Europe for the Sega Genesis in June 1994. It is based on the 1993 film of the same name, which is a semi-fictionalized account of the life of Hong Kong-American actor and martial artist Bruce Lee. Following the events of the movie, players take control of Bruce Lee across several stages that takes places in different time periods of his life and fight against some of his adversaries.
Initially released for Sega platforms, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story was later ported to the Atari Jaguar and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, each one featuring several changes and additions compared with the original version while both the Game Gear and Master System versions, which were also released in 1994, feature an entirely different gameplay format.
Since its release, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story garnered mostly negative reviews, with criticism directed at the slow-paced and shallow gameplay.
Gameplay
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is a fighting game where players assume control of the titular "Dragon" and must defeat the sailor from the dance in Hong Kong, the chefs from the Chinese Restaurant in San Francisco, the martial arts master who challenges Lee, amongst others adversaries through his life to progress further in the title, recalling major action scenes from the film. However, the video game adaptation leaves out valuable plot information from the film and most of the romantic content between Bruce and his future wife Linda. Players can use a variety of martial arts moves to defeat their enemies and build up a chi meter, which can help unleash special moves on their opponents. The players have three continues, and if lost, they must fight The Phantom (the personification of Bruce's fear who takes the form of an armored Japanese Samurai) to continue, though he is near invincible. They face The Phantom Samurai again at the end as a final boss.
The game features supports for up to three players simultaneously, playing through the game co-operatively, or against each other in a battle mode. The CPU-controlled enemy characters are non-playable, and so the additional players only control clones of the same different colored such as: Bruce Lee Wearing blue trousers (black in the SNES port). Bruce Li Wearing green trousers (blue in the SNES port). Bruce Le Wearing red trousers (in any port).
Development and release
The producer for the video game adaptation of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Daniel Marchant, stated in a 1993 interview with Mean Machines Sega that the team was against the idea of creating a beat 'em up project similar to Sega's Streets of Rage 2 (1992) and they instead opted in developing an arcade-style fighting title that was more in the lines of the Street Fighter II series which is also the arcade blockbuster that the developers of Streets of Rage 2 had also used as their inspiration, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story on the other hand has beat 'em up mechanics that are rather similar to the Japanese version of Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (1990), because of the cooperative modes up to three players who fight as re-skinned clones of the same character, the abilitily for characters to wield and attack with nunchucks, and both games having the "Dragon Stomp" move when the opponent is on the ground. The sprite work for each characters consists of 100 frames of animation and the music was done by composer Allister Brimble.
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story was first released for Sega platforms in 1994 on Europe including the Genesis, Game Gear and Master System, while each version of the game were developed internally at Virgin Interactive Entertainment. The Genesis version was also released on Australia during the same year, then in North America the next year where both it and the Game Gear version were published by Acclaim Entertainment instead, and later in Brazil as well by Tectoy. The first console port to be released outside of Europe was the Atari Jaguar conversion on 28 November 1994, which was published by Atari Corporation instead of Virgin and/or Acclaim, and this version was also released in Japan by Messe Sansao in July 1995. The second console port to be released was for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System on 23 February 1995 in Europe and later in North America on July of the same year, becoming both the last version of the game to be officially released and the final version developed by the original team. A version for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer was planned but never released.