The King of Fighters

The King of Fighters ’99 [Arcade – Beta / Concept]

As we can read from Wikipedia, The King of Fighters ’99: Millennium Battle is a 1999 head-to-head fighting game by SNK released for the Neo Geo arcade and home platform. The King of Fighters ’99 initially meant to remove Kyo Kusanagi and Iori Yagami from the series due to the introduction of the new lead character, K’. However, due to negative fan response in location tests, they decided to readd them.

The SNK staff wanted to create a Robo Army Team. However, this idea was abandoned but they later made it a tribute in The King of Fighters 2000 by introducing Rocky, a character from Robo Army as a striker for Maxima. The character from Whip was originally meant to star in The King of Fighters ’96, but due Leona’s introduction in that game, the staff decided to wait until K0F ’99.

Developers also found troubles with the large number of young characters appearing in the game; as such the staff also designed older character such as Maxima and Vannesa to balance the game. In contrast to this Bao was added to the game in order to reduce the average age from the Psycho Soldiers Teams. Bao had many different design before its final one, as you can see in the gallery below.

Here’s the final Bao sprite to compare it with its early designs:

Thanks to Saga Darvulia for the contribution!

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The King of Fighters XII [Unused Characters]

The King of Fighters XII (KOF XII) is the latest installment of the fighting games series developed by SNK Playmore. The game was released in Japan in April 2009 for arcades with an home versions for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3  in July 28 of the same year. Due to the time the developers took to make the sprites, there are only 20 playable characters (the lowest number of characters ever had in a game from the series) but many more unused ones were created in concepts during the development. [Info from Wikipedia] In the gallery below you can check some of these lost fighters!

Also, Mr. Lip Buster from the Ignition Entertainment Forum has found the names of more unused / removed characters in the game’s code: Vice, Hwa, Takuma, a boss, Dark/Orochi(?) Ash, Mai, King, Yuri, Classic Iori, and Billy were all planned and not included. There are 7 more empty spots with no character at all. That’s a total of 17 characters gone from the final version, 10 that had made it to planning and 7 that never even made it to the data. tKoF XII was originally planned to be the conclusion of the Ash saga.

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