The Beats of Rage title screenBeats of Rage is a freeware open source video game and moddable game engine made by Senile Team and inspired by Sega's classic Streets of Rage series. The term "moddable" means that the program allows users to create their own content, and thus their own beat-'em-up game, which is then called a "mod".

Beats of Rage was first made available for download November 2003. It was not advertised in any way other than by word of mouth, yet it soon gained enormous popularity. Within days, the traffic was too much for our servers to handle. In fact, we spent most of the following months setting up mirror sites.

The engine is customisable, and allows for new games to be built on it. These are distributed in a custom PAK format. The games developed for the Beats of Rage engine are commonly referred to as "mods", the creators are commonly referred to as "modders", and the engine itself is commonly referred to as "moddable".

Originally programmed for DOS, Beats of Rage and its offspring were later ported to many systems, including but not limited to:

• Sega Dreamcast
• PlayStation 2
• Linux
• Microsoft Windows
• Xbox
• PlayStation Portable (PSP)
• Nintendo Wii
• GP32
• GP2X
• GP2X Wiz
• AmigaOS (OS4)
• MorphOS
• Pocket PC
• Dingoo A320
• Various phones

Additional ports are still appearing from time to time.

One of the reasons for Beats of Rage's popularity is the fact that customising the engine is remarkably easy, and yet requires no special editing software or programming knowledge. Some even consider it the benchmark for customisable engines for video game consoles.

Level 2 is a sweet-looking bridgeAs Beats of Rage is a customisable engine, the game included with the engine is but one of the many games available. In the included game, character sprites were taken from the King of Fighters series by SNK Playmore. The Streets of Rage series by SEGA also provided a number of graphics. Many of the background graphics were custom-made, although often still mixed with graphics from the aforementioned franchises.

Senile Team are working on a spiritual sequel to Beats of Rage, called Age of the Beast. Age of the Beast aims to offer a superior experience, thanks to more advanced programming and fresh, original content.

Read more about Age of the Beast

OpenBOR is the open source continuations of Beats of Rage. This means that a group of fans are now creating new versions of Beats of Rage, based on the Beats of Rage source code which was released by Senile Team long ago.

OpenBOR provides additional functionality not available in the original Beats of Rage game. It allows modders to add more moves and combos, amongst other things. OpenBOR is maintained by the lovely people at LavaLit. Visit their site to download OpenBOR, mods for both Beats of Rage and for OpenBOR, and to learn more about the project and how to make your own mod.

For a homebrew game, Beats of Rage has enjoyed significant press coverage - online, in printed media and on television. The articles are generally very positive. For example, XboxGamer wrote "B is for Beats of Rage" in their A-Z of Xbox hacking.

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