>>716046536
Beat 'em ups were the quarter thieves. It gave players a sense of progress until suddenly shit started killing you in two hits, then in order to progress you had to feed cash into the fucking machine.

Any beat 'em up that causes you to lose health when you're not taking damage and/or has unavoidable damage is designed to steal your quarters. It's Double Dragon's fault, it got so popular but people also got so good at it they could practically beat it on 25c, so they had to step in and create artificial difficulty for new games.