A Brief History Of Dragon Ball Games
Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball is one of the most influential manga series of all time, laying the foundation for the dramatic fights and escalating stakes that would become a staple of the shonen genre. The combats between spiky-haired martial arts masters, aliens, demons, and other beings are also perfectly suited for video games, and with today's release of Dragon Ball: The Breakers, we wanted to look back and see how Goku and crew’s adventures have fared in the digital age.
Dragon Ball was an immediate success in Japan, so it wasn’t long before the first games came out. But since this was the mid-80s, the quickest path to market was in the form of a standalone handheld LCD device. If you’re not old enough to remember, primitive devices like Nintendo’s Game & Watch featured single-screen games with black-and-white graphics over a printed background. Japanese manufacturer Epoch was the first to license the manga for the LCD game Dragon Ball Pirafu No Gyakushuu.
At the same time, Epoch was selling its own second-generation home console—the Super Cassette Vision. Epoch was one of the first companies to market in Japan with the original Cassette Vision in 1981, but it wasn’t long before competition came on the scene and forced the company to develop a more powerful unit. The Super Cassette Vision only sold from 1984 to 1987, but its library included Dragon Ball: Dragon Daihikyou, the first color DB game. In it, you control young Goku in vertical scrolling action, as well as one-on-one side-view fights.
Epoch let the Dragon Ball license lapse in 1986, and it was quickly snatched up by Bandai, the publisher that would become most closely associated with the series. The company wasted no time in getting its first title out for
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