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Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone

Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone

Console: Atari ST
TV Standard: PAL
Release Date: 1990-01-01
Players: 2
Co-op: Yes
ESRB: E - Everyone
Type: Fighting

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone is a side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game produced by Technōs Japan in 1990. It is the third arcade game in the Double Dragon series. Unlike the previous two games in the series Double Dragon 3 was not developed internally at Technōs, but development was instead contracted to the company East Technology, resulting in a game that looks and plays differently from its predecessors.

As in the previous games of the series, players control twin martial artists Billy and Jimmy Lee, as they are approached by a mysterious fortune teller named Hiruko, who sends them on a worldwide journey to retrieve three mystical stones and uncover the mystery surrounding them in Egypt. Similar to The Combatribes, which ran on similar hardware, the game can be set for up to two or three players depending on the cabinet, with the third player controlling a new Lee sibling named Sonny. The U.S. version also features item shops where players could use additional credits to purchase in-game items such as weapons, additional moves and new playable characters in one of the earliest forms of microtransactions in a video game, although this system would end up being removed in the later-released Japanese version of the game in favour of a conventional character select feature similar to Golden Axe or Final Fight.