Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive (DOA) (デッドオアアライブ) is a video game series produced by Tecmo that is comprised primarily of fighting games. The story and characters are the creation of Tomonobu Itagaki, and the game was developed by Tecmo's Team Ninja development team. more...

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A feature film, DOA: Dead or Alive, directed by Corey Yuen and starring Devon Aoki, Jaime Pressly, Holly Valance, Sarah Carter and Natassia Malthe was released on August 25, 2006.

Gameplay

The Dead or Alive series focuses on fast-paced gameplay in a three-dimensional playing field. In comparison to other fighters in its genre, such as Virtua Fighter, the series places emphasis on striking characters quickly and efficiently. Air juggling is a factor in the series, but is easier to execute and more favorable due to the countering system and character's recovery times, which disallows slow, technical sets of moves in most instances.

DOA's most innovative additions to the genre is its countering system. Beginning from the original Dead or Alive, players could input a backwards directional input in cooperation with the respective guard button to defend against a characters attack whilst dealing significant damage to the victim's life bar. Counter holds must be timed correctly with an attack, and also must be inputted correspondingly with the area of attack. For example, a character that successfully counters a low kick attack from another player must time the input as well as place a downward directional push on the joystick.

Like other modern fighting games that attempt to emulate the real life martial arts, DOA's input system is modeled on the controls to correspond to the actions being carried out by the avatar; a forward directive punch would most likely be executed with the punch input and the pressing of the directional pad in the appropriate direction.

The series controls also make the instances of speed and simplicity more congruent with the focus of timing and combos in mind, as the commands for basic attacks are widely considered more straightforward than most video games. There is only one button for punch, kick, throw and guard, with the player rarely having to combine more than two different input schemes together at the time.

In Dead or Alive 2, the series became innovative in its tag fighting system, allowing characters to switch back and forth for combo attacks and even attack simultaneously when timed correctly. The tag mode also implemented special throws unique to each pair of characters chosen, and allows the participation of a four player mode, something not common in the genre.

Inspiration and development

The DOA series is designed by programmer Tomonobu Itagaki, who is regarded by the game development community for his outspoken and stubborn nature in the development of the series. Before the release of the original Dead or Alive, Itagaki had recently become a programmer for the budding company Tecmo, which was in need of a brand of video games to establish a sufficient market. In this vein, Itagaki made a wager with the head of the company, assuring the president he would create a video game that would garner a competent fan base.

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