- Joined
- Apr 10, 2019
- Posts
- 1,175
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:
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
SNK Devs Once Put Goku In King Of Fighters 98
In the latest installment of Polygon’s ongoing deep dive series on the making of classic fighting games, veteran developer Toyohisa Tanabe revealed that his team at SNK was experimenting with crossovers as far back as King of Fighters 98.
kotaku.com
“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
Last edited: