When I was eleven, Double Dragon was the only title in the world that mattered

If there's one thing I had to tell you about the expectations I held for adult life when I was eleven, I could probably boil it down to a single word: henchmen.

Back then, I assumed that adult life would be all about fighting henchmen.

I thought they would be my number one problem, and my first weary thought when I awoke in the morning as a grown-up.

And I was not alone in thinking this.

.

When I was eleven, I went from primary school to secondary school, and a lot of the people in my class were similarly worried about henchmen.

Some of my classmates tried to hack together their own martial art to give them an edge in bar brawls.

One of my friends took to carrying a spanner to school in case he needed something heavy to hand for dishing out justice.

Alas, it fell out of his bag once when he was scrabbling for his homework in RE, and he was "Spanner" for the next seven years of his life.

.

(Even as I type this I'm aware that it sounds very much like I'm writing about my own specific experience from a false distance.

In truth, I was so far down the hierarchy I could only wish I had a cool nickname like "Spanner".) There were two main reasons for all this worrying about henchmen.

The first is that I had just gone up to big school, so was now significantly smaller than everyone else in my social world.

It was terrifying! And being born in June just made me smaller still.

.

Some of my own year towered above me.

And then there was what nobody at the time referred to as the media landscape.

Henchmen were a big deal in media in 1989.

There had been an Indiana Jones film that year, sure, but the summer belonged to Batman, and Batman wasn't looking for treasure.

.

He was out to fight henchmen.

He fought henchmen in the movies and he fought them in the American comics that were suddenly easier to come by.

But most of the henchmen lived in cyberspace, behind the curved, smoked glass of the monitors down at Computer Planet in town ## Editor's Note Stay tuned for more updates as this story develops. Source: [Eurogamer](https://www.eurogamer.net/remembering-double-dragon-arcade-classic)