King of Fighters 98 Special (prototype?)

kingcuckmelon1

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Toyohisa Tanabe (Capcom vs. SNK pixel art supervisor)says there was an alternate build of King of Fighters 98, featuring Ryu and Ken

https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/7/22214717/capcom-vs-snk-an-oral-history?fbclid=IwAR1Z3RhA91GKXKETiYmUrIs2N14aBJKRDV2Puum5eY9SYT4lbdk-EIbltf4

"Two years before Capcom vs. SNK came out, we made King of Fighters '98, and we actually had a little bit of time after we finished development. So the team ended up making a build of the game with Ryu and Ken in it. This isn't something that a lot of people know — I think only the developers know about it, and I've never told anyone myself — but yeah, just for fun, before Capcom vs. SNK was a thing, I was playing as Ryu and Ken in King of Fighters '98."

This is very interesting, yet another unknown Neo Geo prototype. It confirms something Billy/Supergun once said about there possibly being an early version of SNK vs Capcom. It would be amazing if this was found, the ROM has got to be somewhere!
 

Fygee

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Pretty neat.

Makes me wonder just how complete those Ryu and Ken additions were. Probably head swaps instead of full on new sprites, unless they had a lot of extra time to animate them from scratch.
 

kingcuckmelon1

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Pretty neat.

Makes me wonder just how complete those Ryu and Ken additions were. Probably head swaps instead of full on new sprites, unless they had a lot of extra time to animate them from scratch.

I have seen hacks of KOF97 where Ken is just slapped in verbatim (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OT8K1Fs2vA) but you never know what assets these developers had access to so I'd imagine whatever they had was somewhat more refined.
 
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