The Demo Site

It's a dark evening in inner-city New York. The alleyways are full of trash and graffiti. Criminals are lurking everywhere – junkies, gangsters, even murderers.

You take a wrong turn down a shadowy alleyway, and soon find yourself surrounded by a gang of thugs. They don't say anything, they just set upon you.

It's a frightening scenario, and sets the scene for just about every side-scrolling beat 'em up released in the early 1990s (think Final Fight, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage). In fact, the market was so flooded by these cliched fighters by 1991, it was difficult to tell them apart.

But Sega came up with an originnal concept for the genre. They decided their own New York-style beat 'em up, Riot City, would keep some of the cliches (dirty subways, knife-wielding thugs, etc.), but would also add something new to the mix: gayness. That's right, gayness.

Now, let's clear this up so nobody gets confused. I'm not describing Riot City as "gay" in the South Park sense of being "lame". No, I'm talking fully-fledged, black leather, glory hole, "there's nothing wrong with that", F'd-in-the-A, kind of gay.

Need proof? Just look at the two main characters, Paul and Bobby:

Just friends? I think Paul's gaze suggests otherwise. Here they are in action together:

I'll leave you to ponder what they're doing in that one. Suffice to say, the main characters of Riot City don't come across as the straightest knives in the kitchen. But Sega didn't just restrict the gayness to its main stars. No, they made everything gay. Just look at the bad guys:

The first guy kind of resembles the bikie from the Village People. The second looks like Freddie Mercury. And the third looks like a decrepit, overweight Heath Ledger from Brokeback Mountain (OK, so that's a bit of a stretch. But he actually does look identical to an Australian gay music icon, Molly Meldrum).

Most of these baddies also feature names like Hans, Rod or Hung. Seriously. But the gayness doesn't stop there. The ultimate homo-awards go to the bosses who wait at the end of each level:

And that's still not all. These are the "power ups" your characters go around collecting:

No baseball bats or semi-automatic rifles for these "tough guys". Just beauty products and fashion accessories. I ask you, what kind of self-respecting, underworld bad-ass patrols the streets of New York picking up pink mirrors? Clearly a guy who also gets into situations like this:

I could go on forever here, but I think you get the point: Riot City, like the Teletubbies, is a little bit on the gay side. The only question that remains is why Sega ever thought melding a side-scrolling beat 'em up with a Village People film clip would be a good idea. Surely the homosexual side-scrolling market wasn't that lucrative back in 1991. Or existent.

It all remains a baffling mystery. It's also very hard to find much information on this most bizarre of games. As far as I can tell, Riot City was largely unsuccessful. It didn't get a release outside of Japan, it didn't make it to any consoles, and, unlike every other sidescroller ever created in the 1990s, it didn't spawn a sequel.

One thing we do know, however, is that one year after releasing Riot City, Sega followed up with two new games: Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racer. Neither of them featured Freddie Mercury, and both were far more successful.