Chi Yong is a cancelled fighting game in development by Lightspeed Productions for the original Playstation in 1996. This is quite an obscure and forgotten project: we can’t even find any detail about its developers. Chi Yong was officially announced in a few websites and gaming magazines in late 1996. It was meant to be a 4 players fighting game game featuring digitized actors, similar to Mortal Kombat. Some of the actors were even the same.
As we can read in an old press release:
MK Actors to Star in New Fighting Game
Martial arts actors used in the Mortal Kombat series are being digitised again for forthcoming title Chi Yong. HoSang Pak, Daniel Pesina, Katalin Zamier, Phillip Ahn and Liz Malecki all featured in various Mortal Kombat incarnations. They have been picked to show off their martial arts prowess for Lightspeed Productions forthcoming beat-’em up.
Chi Yong (a working title which means ‘spirit of the dragon’) is a four-play multi-tap fighting game for PlayStation. Right now it’s about 20 per cent complete and should be available by the end of this year. A spokesperson for the company commented: “Most of the actors digitized are black belts in martial arts. We feel that using real martial artists with experience gives realism and authenticity to the fighting game.”
The story gets even weirder when you find out that the same actors were already planned to be featured in “Thea Realm Fighters”, a cancelled 1 VS 1 fighting game in development by High Voltage Software for the Atari Jaguar (later leaked online). There’s even a TRF promotional poster given away at E3 1995 in which we can read “ⓒ Lightspeed Productions” written in the bottom-left. We don’t know what kind of relationship High Voltage Software had with Lightspeed Productions. We can’t find any more details about who Lightspeed Productions were or what happened to them.
It seems TRF was almost complete in 1996 when Atari cancelled it alongside other upcoming Jaguar projects. We can speculate that its assets (such as the digitized actors) were kept by Lightspeed Productions to develop Chi Yong for Playstation. While the two games used the same characters, Chi Yong was expanded to become a 4 players fighting game, a nice addition for a Mortal Kombat clone.
If you know someone who worked at Lightspeed Productions, please let us know!
Thanks to eSpy for the contribution!
Images:
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It’s been claimed that an unnamed coder at HVS commented at the time that Atari cancelled TRF in favor of MKIII, which they gave to Probe Software and HVS,not Probe should of received the conversion not Probe.
Also, HVS company President Kerry Ganofsky had stated they would not be doing any more games after there current finished products of NBA Jam, Country Grid and Kid Grid, unless Atari
offered them a high profile title.
Found a few soundbites from 1 of the team in my old files:
My main Jaguar opus was actually porting Tempest 2000 from the Jaguar,although I was trapped in several months of hell helping with a JagCD fighting game called “Thea Realm Fighters” (I could write a book about that one), I also did a little dabbling for a classics project that never materialized and did tool support on a couple of other programs.
Oh yeah, I had to share an office with the guy testing “Vid Grid” “Kid Vid Grid” and, yes “Country Vid Grid”. If I hear the opening to “No More Tears” one more time, a shopping mall gets it. :-)
Nate Trost
Doesn’t look like he was too big a fan of the Jaguar:
Heh, screw Quake 2 and all that with stuff, I’m just going to devote my life to porting Club Drive to the Mac. 
Or not.
Nate (had to WORK on Jaguar titles, thankyouverymuch) Trost
hi … do you have any stuff from thea the realm fighters game?
can this be made available for download?
thank you in advance
Think Lightspeed was HoSung Pak & Brother in Laws company. Been a long time but I can ask!
Thanks for this