Video game development is a fickle business, prone to false starts and dead ends that rarely see the light of day. That sentiment is increased tremendously when talking about fighters, as the genre often fails to meet the same profitability of its contemporaries while carrying even greater demands.
Former SNK Playmore producer Masaaki Kukino (who many readers may know for his work on King of Fighters XIII) learned this first hand during his tenure at Konami. While its name has been lost to time, Kukino and his team began work on an unreleased fighter sometime in 1992, putting together a cast inspired by mythological and religious figures.
During an interview for the first volume of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, John Szczepaniak spoke to Kukino about this project at length. Describing it as closer to Mortal Kombat than Street Fighter, Kukino explained that the characters would fall apart as fights wore on, revealing them to be robots instead of flesh and bone. “We were trying to do that using 2D images, not even 3D. So the manpower required to create and program that was really beyond imagination,” he continued. “It happened more than 20 years ago, so would have been difficult at the time.”
Unfortunately, it was that manpower requirement that eventually contributed to the project’s demise.
“It had really breakthrough ideas in terms of art style, and also the [mechanical] game system, and we found the idea really interesting. So we wanted to do it. The reason why we could not proceed on that project was that it required really high manpower, and it was so time consuming,” Kukino said. “Also the capacity required for the hardware was too high. So those challenges were not something we were able to overcome. That’s why we had to terminate it. The entire team had to shift its focus on to something else.”
Could this Konami title have changed the landscape of fighting games in their heyday? Would we be seeing fans clamoring for a high-definition reboot today? We’ll probably never know, but it’s always entertaining when a developer opens up about the past and allows us a glimpse of what could have been. We’ve included a handful of hand-drawn concepts for this game below; be warned, they do depict some slight gore and nudity.
Click to view slideshow.
Feel free to let us know what you think of this unreleased title in the comments below. For more of Szczepaniak’s discussion with Kukino, be sure to check out the full interview here.
Source: Gamasutra via Patrick Miller
