So, we would have characters whose lower body hitboxes would remain, or who would have hitboxes during certain frames, all sorts of things like that.
At first, sidestepping wouldn’t give you total invincibility. We tried implementing this mechanic thinking “normally you would just get out of the way”, and I think it came out well.
– The inclusion of sidesteps gives The King of Fighters a different feel than other fighting games up until now.Ī: When your opponent attacks you, the only choice you’ve had up until now is to guard. You could also do the sidestep input in midair to dodge attacks at first, but from a visual standpoint it was a bit hard to read, and the game had this hollow feeling when attacks missed too often, so in the end that was removed as well. Do you have any anecdotes to share surrounding those?Ī: We had this mechanic where you would put the opponent character in a Nelson hold, and using the same requirements as an Assist Attack, could call your partner character in from the background to whale on your opponent… but when we considered how it affected the game’s pacing, it got scrapped. – KOF’94 introduces a number of new mechanics. We decided on “KOF” because you would get a good idea of the game’s content from the title alone. – When did you come up with the title “KOF’94”?Ī: About a year ago. At first we would just use assets directly from the source games for characters from Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, but in the end we redrew every character, which took up an enormous amount of time. Beyond giving players a huge number of characters to use in team battles, we thought it would be best to make a game that didn’t change mechanics too drastically from what people were already accustomed to.Ī: About two years. – Did you plan on making the general rules of the game similar to those of Fatal Fury Special?Ī: Fatal Fury-type fighting games are some of the most mainstream in the genre, so that was a natural starting point for us. We would be borrowing characters that other teams had created… So then we decided that if we were going to have characters from Fatal Fury, we might as well make a celebration-like game covering all of SNK’s characters.
– How did you end up deciding to use popular SNK characters from previous titles?Ī: The idea for team battles came first, and then after that was stuff like scheduling, but when we got to thinking about how to make the game popular, the idea of “what if we use characters from Fatal Fury?” came up… but at first there was a decent amount of opposition. When that eventually took form, it became the Team Battle System you see in the current game. At that point, we were left with the direction of a “team component” from the previous plan, and thought we would make some kind of team competition-type game like judo or kendo. Eventually, it ended up changing from a side-scrolling action game to the more popular genre of Vs.
It was generally referred to by the name “Downtown Team Battle” (laughs). The selling point for the game would be that you lead a whole team, like a team of delinquents, into battle. – How did plans for The King of Fighters ’94 (referred to henceforth as “KOF’94”) begin?Ī: The original idea was that we would make a horizontal-scrolling brawler-type game. The initial plan was “Downtown Team Battle” In attendance were the director in charge of general supervision Ms. The “All About Series” staff went to SNK headquarters nearby the Esaka station in Osaka to carry out an interview with the production staff of The King of Fighters ’94.