KOF 98 with Street Fighter and DBZ characters

sirlynxalot

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I'm sure many here are familiar with the interview a few years ago where former SNK devs were talking about how they made an internal build of KOF 98 with crossover characters:

“The team ended up making a build of King of Fighters 98 with Ryu and Ken [from Street Fighter] in it,” Tanabe said. “This isn’t something that a lot of people know. ut yeah, just for fun, before Capcom vs. SNK was a thing, I was playing as Ryu and Ken in King of Fighters 98.

“We did this on the development hardware, so of course it was never on a physical cartridge. Also, I’m just remembering this now, but it wasn’t only Ryu and Ken that we ended up playing around with. We put in Dragon Ball characters, like Son Goku, as well.”


But what this makes me wonder about this description, is the sheer amount of work it would take to make fully fledged KOF style versions of these third party characters. Spritework and animation is slow and tedious and KOF98 style characters have hundreds of sprites. It would probably take 100+ hours to develop a single fully fledged KOF 98 style character if you were actually drawing sprites for animation from scratch, arranging hit boxes, etc.

Let's consider then, that maybe SNK was somehow ripping the Street Fighter sprites from an existing version of Street Fighter, and the DBZ sprites from one of the various 2D DBZ games of the 90s, and simply finding a way to insert and animate these sprites into their neogeo KOF 98 internal version. Circa 1997/1998 is pretty early for publicly available SNES emulators, MAME was in its infancy, and I don't think CPS1 or CPS2 emulation really existed yet. Even if some early emulators existed, they likely didn't have extensive options to turn off background layers or view sprites within roms. It certainly would have been a pretty considerable and time consuming undertaking to rip hundreds of sprites from these third party games, stick them in a neogeo game, and then spend many hours programming to hopefully get them somewhat working with existing palette limitations and conventions in KOF98, developing hit boxes for the sprites, programming the animations and moves that the characters do, etc.

So what do I think really happened? I bet they just did some palette tweaks to make existing KOF characters such as Ryo and Takuma look somewhat like Ryu, Ken, and Goku, added a few adjustments to fireballs and existing Ryo/Takuma moves, mainly using existing sprites, to remind the internal team of these third party characters, and then enjoyed playing their internal-use-only build in their limited free time.

Or maybe they got confused and were playing this Chinese bootleg "KOF 98" game for SNES with Street Fighter characters in it
 
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Burning Fight!!

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Look at the credits for KOF '98, specifically in the amount of "Front Designers" that worked in the game. The KOF 98 team had more than enough manpower for them to make 3 or 4 relatively polished characters from scratch in their spare time just for fun, for sure.
 

HornheaDD

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I used to own that weird bootleg "KOF 98'" for the Genny. It was a piece of shit.
 

sirlynxalot

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Look at the credits for KOF '98, specifically in the amount of "Front Designers" that worked in the game. The KOF 98 team had more than enough manpower for them to make 3 or 4 relatively polished characters from scratch in their spare time just for fun, for sure.

I hear you, looks like there were about 13 front designers, but each of these designers worked on 3-4 KOF 98 characters as a full time job. Judging from the credits, it doesn't seem like 10 of them would collaborate to draw the sprite sheet for a single character to make that production process go faster. Still seems like the time tradeoff wouldn't be worth it to have a few gimmick characters that will never see the public light of day, like lets put 200 hours into making custom characters so we can play around with them in the office in joke matches for 5 hours.
 

sirlynxalot

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I'd give kernow's response a 4/5, an understated style that implies an insult, very characteristic of him and fun to read.

Tarma's was more concise than usual but what you see is what you get, not much on the style front. He was first though so there's some merit there even if there's nothing to tickle the funny bone. 2/5.

Lach's is stale, the whole this smells like farts thing is so overdone, by you specifically, it's your go to thing that you've said countless times before. Real lack of originality here. Style points also deducted for coming late to the game. This did nothing for me. A complete failure. 0/5.
 

Heinz

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I'd give kernow's response a 4/5, an understated style that implies an insult, very characteristic of him and fun to read.

Tarma's was more concise than usual but what you see is what you get, not much on the style front. He was first though so there's some merit there even if there's nothing to tickle the funny bone. 2/5.

Lach's is stale, the whole this smells like farts thing is so overdone, by you specifically, it's your go to thing that you've said countless times before. Real lack of originality here. Style points also deducted for coming late to the game. This did nothing for me. A complete failure. 0/5.
Oh sorry sir is the banter not up to par? Get fucked.
 

Burning Fight!!

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I'd give kernow's response a 4/5, an understated style that implies an insult, very characteristic of him and fun to read.

Tarma's was more concise than usual but what you see is what you get, not much on the style front. He was first though so there's some merit there even if there's nothing to tickle the funny bone. 2/5.

Lach's is stale, the whole this smells like farts thing is so overdone, by you specifically, it's your go to thing that you've said countless times before. Real lack of originality here. Style points also deducted for coming late to the game. This did nothing for me. A complete failure. 0/5.
strip his man off his award now
 

kernow

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I'm guessing... It didn't take 200hrs
It probably took a day tops as they'd rip the sprite art then knock some moves together in code - they're a company after all, stuff like this happens all the time and it rarely takes longer than a lunch break or two
 

SignOfGoob

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You guys are way over thinking things. They didn’t draw hundreds of frames of perfectly colored animation for placeholders in an early prototype.

When you’re designing the new Honda Civic engine you don’t have a new body yet so you stick the prototype in the old test mule that you used to develop the current Civic. This works across innumerable other industries.
 

sirlynxalot

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You guys are way over thinking things. They didn’t draw hundreds of frames of perfectly colored animation for placeholders in an early prototype.

When you’re designing the new Honda Civic engine you don’t have a new body yet so you stick the prototype in the old test mule that you used to develop the current Civic. This works across innumerable other industries.
So you're saying then, that it's more likely they put ryu, ken and Goku into KOF 97?
 

SignOfGoob

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So you're saying then, that it's more likely they put ryu, ken and Goku into KOF 97?

Yes, actually. Because KOF 98 is what you get when you MUGEN KOF 97. They are largely the same game.

Then add sprites from…who knows. At that point most 16 bit stuff was emulated including CPS-1. They could have used SFII and Hyper Dimension sprites. They wouldn’t need to fully animated, just the hit boxes. They may have only had them in place for a week until some assets were completed.
 

max 330 mega

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Yes, actually. Because KOF 98 is what you get when you MUGEN KOF 97. They are largely the same game.

Then add sprites from…who knows. At that point most 16 bit stuff was emulated including CPS-1. They could have used SFII and Hyper Dimension sprites. They wouldn’t need to fully animated, just the hit boxes. They may have only had them in place for a week until some assets were completed.
Stfu cum-chasm
 

HellioN

, What The Fuck Is This Shit?
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Did... Did he seriously compare KoF '98 to Mugen?
My mind simply can not comprehend.
 

Atro

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He can say whatever he wants. It'll never be as moronic as geladobom tho 😂
 

SignOfGoob

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Anyone who actually makes anything will understand the iterative process and recognize the common quotidian bullshit nature of doing something as sensational as putting Ryu in an early version of a KOF game. This is exciting for fans but just another day on the job for artists, technicians, engineers. This is not a brag, it’s a confession. Kaizen kaizen kaizen…everything is MUGEN.

Those in finance, law, advertising, retail, the priesthood, etc will never grasp it.
 
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