The History of Urban Rivals, the web trading card game of gangsters, cowboys and wizards

ToulouTouMou
13 min readDec 9, 2024

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For a change, I want to tell the story of a game that is still up and running, a game that existed for more than two decades, started as a phone game way before smartphones were even a thing, a game that evolved over the years, survived the end of Flash, and is still thriving despite a failed spinoff, numerous tie-in comics, and two decades of drastic changes in the videogame industry. This is the story of Urban Rivals.

You might have encountered the name at least once if you were online back in the 2010s. Advertisements for this game were everywhere, on the side of a website, inside Flash games while loading, etc… It usually featured some kind of character starting small and weak at “level 1”, then evolving to become an impressive warrior, or in the case of women, big breasted tall gals, sometimes wielding magic or big guns. The idea was simple: Start small, evolve and become cool, in an urban fantasy setting. Straightforward enough, and definitely eye grabbing. Everything else about the game was secondary, what was important was showing how cool a character could get, and this character might be yours. Now that the game had your attention, you could click on it to answer the simple question: What is Urban Rivals.

The different states of evolution of the Card ‘Kenny MT’

The gameplay is simple and hasn’t really changed since its beginning: It is an online trading card game, or TCG, where the player has to build a deck and fight the computer or other players. For someone not used to card games such as myself, think of it a bit like Yu-Gi-Oh: players have health points, and attack their opponent by sending their cards to battle. If the card is more powerful than the one sent to battle by the opponent, they are defeated and receive damages. This is the most basic interaction in the game, but of course everything is about building your deck, buying cards packs, or making your cards more powerful by making them evolve.

Several early cards of Urban Rivals, 2007

The main page of the website says the game takes place in Clint City, an urban setting where several factions fight for supremacy, each with their gimmicks and visual identities. From the very beginning the aesthetic was a blend of everything seen as cool in the 2000s: You could see military characters, street gangsters, magic wielders, even vampires and monsters. It seems like everything goes in Clint City, as long as it looks cool: Every design is maximalist, each character becoming visually more powerful and ridiculous, sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidentally.

Battle Screen, 2006

We can clearly see the game inspiration when we know the game was released in the early 2000s: urban culture and punk for the aesthetic, Pokémon for the leveling up mechanics, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic the Gathering for the gameplay loop. But we are missing something to understand where this game came from. Because Urban Rivals didn’t actually start on the Internet. Information online is very scarce and decaying fast, and despite its popularity there is very little information about the beginning of Urban Rivals. So, what I’ll say next is entirely based off of fan wikis and fan blogs, but it seems overall coherent: the game was actually launched in 2003 as Clint Fighting, for mobile phones.

Icon of Clint City-Urban Rivals, 2003

We tend to forget it sometimes but before the app stores, there were already a lot of games made for mobiles, studios dedicated to making them, and online stores to buy them. To understand the context in which it was created, we need to talk about I-mode. Invented in Japan in the late 90s, it was a service for mobile phones allowing one to connect to the Internet. You could only read specific web pages, but there was already a robust game portail in many countries, France included. All of this might sound strange for young people born after the 2000s but getting games for phones was a hassle, and depended heavily on which phone you had, if you could connect to the internet, which wasn’t a given at the time, and if you had enough data to download the game.

This is in this context that the first version of what would become Urban Rivals was released. The concept was already here, with the factions, starter cards, characters to evolve, PvP and PvE. The game already had quite a lot of depth, with more than 300 characters available. To get new cards, you had to buy packs the old fashioned way: Sending an SMS for 3 euros and type a code you received on the website. The practice was pretty standard at the time, so it is not really a surprise.

Logo of the second version of the game, circa 2006 when the game was ported to the web

The game was made by a small french studio called Acute Game. It might come as a surprise to the players who assume it was an US production, seeing all the american pop culture imagery and general vibe. Or maybe it is not a surprise, seeing how much it is an Americana pastiche of what a crime-riddled American city looks like. Anyway, the studio is entirely dedicated to developing and maintaining Urban Rivals. It is possible they were around already before Clint City, making games for mobiles, but I am unable to find any information about it, even their own website is not interested in showing anything but Urban Rivals. It makes sense for business, but it is very disappointing for anyone trying to look at their history.

It is hard to gauge the popularity of Clint Fighting but fan blogs active during that time says there were more than 8000 players in Europe. In 2006, the game was ported to the web, first in Java, then in Flash. As far as most people are concerned, this is where the actual story begins: it was now called Urban Rivals, and the Flash version would become immensely popular.. But that means there is 3 years of history that are now almost lost. There are few screenshots online of the I-mode version, and no proof the game has been preserved in any form. Even the “official timeline” on the Urban Rival website started in 2006.

Map of Clint City, the setting of Urban Rivals

But it seems the game was very similar in spirit: You could collect many different cards and make them fight in order to gain level and evolve. From the very beginning, the emphasis was put on the community, PvP being the main mode of playing. There are guilds, rankings, tournaments, etc… Over the years, updates were very frequent, the team behind the game was extremely active to provide new cards, characters, game modes, options…

One would assume that there wasn’t much of a story to the game, that it was a simple game about rival clans, and the events were as complex as the story mode of a fighting game. But that’s far from the truth. From the very beginning, each character had a bio attached to it, describing their story, how they came to Clint City, relationship with other characters, motivations, etc… In fact, the lore is so dense I can’t help but feel dizzy when I read the fan wiki. People were very engaged by the story that was developed on a weekly basis with each update. Of course you could skip all that and focus on the game, but if you wanted to know why some character looked that way, there was a strong possibility the character had a bio explaining what their deal was.

Cover of the comic Book Sentinel Stories Volume 1, 2008

This is probably why in 2008, a comic book was published and sold in libraries It was called “Sentinel Stories Volume 1”, subtitled Urban Rivals. Written by someone named Edmond Tourriol, this comic is not surprisingly out of print and has been for a while, the copies available on the secondhand market being prohibitively expensive. Also, I am not often blunt on those articles, but those comics look like garbage, a very weird take on the American comics styles of the 2000s. Also, despite the fact that it is titled ‘volume 1’, I cannot find any traces of another volume. This book is in fact the printed version of webcomics previously published on the Urban Rivals website. There was a few ongoing series at the time, each dedicated to a certain faction, or a character in particular. How many pages of the webcomic comprised the first volume of this book, I don’t know. But it seems like other webcomics were compiled and published under another name: “Urban Rivals — Rien ne va plus”. And, to yet again tempt fate, it was given the subtitle “tome 1”, without any trace of a tome 2.

Cover of the Comic Book Urban Rivals volume 1, 2014

What is not out of print is the 2014 euromanga (yes this is apparently a word that exists) Urban Rivals, that lasted for two tomes. So… At least it was twice as successful as the previous attempts. And for this one I have been able to purchase a copy online. It looks better than the pseudo american comic style of the previous title, but it’s still not good. Let’s be honest, this manga is no one’s passion project, it was simply a product. That doesn’t mean a product can’t be good, but this one, and the previous books, seems to do the bare minimum, and the makers were probably expecting to sell them entirely because of brand recognition.

As a side note, I find it very interesting that during the early 2010s, websites and web games were all trying to branch off by publishing books. I mean, it shows that Urban Rival was big enough to warrant four different books, while way bigger websites such as Prizee just had one. They were very invested in branching on new paths, trying new ventures and especially writing stories for their characters to live. Or it is a product of one man’s hubris, the author Edmond Tourriol previously mentioned, and if you think I am too harsh on him, just know that most of his work nowadays is having a blog where he whine about wokism destroying society or whatever, so I don’t see any reason to show him some respect or even take him seriously.

But this is a good time as any as addressing the elephant in the room: the art style. It is the most inconsistent part of the whole game. Sure, the game looks more or less coherent today, but it is obvious many cards and characters were drawn by different people. And when you browse the wiki, you see all sorts of designs coming from two decades of artistic influences, often clashing between each other. Which brings us to another point I want to talk about: sexism.

Official artworks of the character Lilith

Please indulge with me, unless you are already rolling your eyes at the mere mention of the word “sexism”, in that case I don’t want to interact with you and please stop reading any of my work. Anyway, the sexism in the game. Here is my opinion: sex is good in fiction, great even, I appreciate sexiness, and the inclusion of so-called “useless” sex scenes doesn’t bother me at all, when they are in the appropriate media. And I am not eloquent enough to explain where I feel sexyness is warranted and when it is not. But I feel like Urban Rivals always have been too much, and often not in the good way. The game is not really for kids, due to the aesthetic it tends toward a teenage audience. But does that mean the people making it should have a teenage mindset? Or cater to the male teenage audience’s most basic sensibilities?

The presentation of the faction ‘Pussycats’ displayed in the homepage in 2007

I am talking now about the 2011-ish version of the game, the one that made it so popular. Every woman is big breasted, young looking and conventionally attractive. There are points for diversity but as far as I can see the diversity is only here to reinforce race stereotypes. The women in games look and act strong, okay, but that’s not enough. They feel like they are barely anything more than eye candies. Some of the designs are cool while many of them are very bad. The thing that bothers me is that those are always the same kind of appeals for women characters. Always the same body type, always the same age, while male counterparts are varying greatly. For a game boasting hundreds of characters we can’t help but notice this.

There are characters that are more explicitly sexualized, with pinup poses and all. And again, the basic concept of sexiness is not the problem. A woman character can feel sexy, use their body to show off, it can be part of a character. The problem is that they don’t feel substantially different from the other women characters. They are also young looking, conventionally attractive, thin with a decently sized chest. We are still talking about the same body type, only one is showing her panties while another one is supposed to be a basketball player.

Official artwork of the character Gaia Noel

This is not an universal rule, and it is very different depending on the artist working on the card. And it is easy to point out that it was the time and every game did that. True, the biggest video game releases of the time were only interested in catering to a male audience. But only because everyone did that at some point in time, that doesn’t mean it was acceptable then, or now. We need to reckon with the problems of the time, and we have to start to admit that even back in the days those games were excluding basically 50% of the World population, just because they perceived video games as a “boy hobby”. Which is not and have never been.

Despite every criticism I have against this version of the game, I cannot deny the fact: Urban Rivals was extremely successful. In 2010, it had almost ten millions players, was available in eight languages, and showed no sign of fatigue because this number tripled in three years. This is probably why they tried to branch off the franchise with something other than a comic book: a spin off called “Fantasy Rivals”. It’s right in the title, it’s the same gameplay as Urban Rivals, with the heroes, the factions, and all, but in a fantasy setting. All new characters, new art direction, and seemingly a very big budget for a web based free-to-play game released in the midst of the smartphone revolution. The beta launched in 2013 and it was seemingly active at least until 2015, but closed down afterward. It never really took off, maybe because of the competitive nature of the market.

Also, if you read my previous articles, you know what will come: The later part of the 2010s was not kind to browser games, because of the smartphone revolution. Iphones were ubiquitous in the early 2010s, and smartphones became basically unavoidable during the following years. This meant a massive shift in gaming culture, and gamer’s habits: Casual gaming became very common, and people spent less and less time on computers. So, imagine what it means for web games relying heavily on Flash, a technology banned from smartphones. Many browser games at the time closed down while others made unsuccessful pivots to mobile. Urban Rivals was in a different position: they started on mobiles, and became successful on the web. They tried to ride the wave of the changing Internet early, by adding Facebook integration, but that wouldn’t be enough to save the game from dying.

Homepage in 2013 (Source: Wayback Machine)

So, something happened in the second part of 2015, unusual for the games we are used to talk in here: they actually got better. The website was massively revamped to offer a more modern and coherent artstyle. And by 2017, they got back to their roots: They ported their games to the app store. A free to play card game is perfect for the modern mobile market. In fact, it is kind of crazy to think they weren’t trend chasers on that part: they were precursors. In two decades of writing about browser games, I cannot think of many examples of online games surviving this long and still thriving.

Also, I won’t go as far as saying the sexism issue was resolved, we can still see bikini armors and such, but I think the art direction massively improved and allowed for more diverse characters, including LGBTQ+ characters. This is the bare minimum for a game, I’d say, but it’s nice to see nonetheless.

Homepage of the game in 2024

Which brings us to 2024, where the game is still up and running, and even more: it is actually still played, with an active community, a Steam version of the game, and a heavy presence on social media. I have seen no proof the game or the company was bought, changed leadership or anything. It seems like they survived all these years by running a tight ship. Playing it myself, I had no trouble finding another game to play against. It is not very balanced because I got my ass handed to me in seconds, but still, I respect the commitment.

I don’t really have any other point to bring to this story, except that it is a good game if you’re into trading card games. It is accessible to beginners, and the many improvements made it a smooth experience, quite fun if you are willing to learn the ropes.

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ToulouTouMou
ToulouTouMou

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