In the day when home consoles could not bring as much as excitement, particular joy and thrill were the elements of the experience brought by arcades, especially one of those located in arcade shops. What brought this much of euphoria over other home consoles was the fact not only arcade most of the time had some extra scenes to the story of some sort but also the experience as whole.
Arcade gaming of the past
When you wanted to play in one of those arcade shops, you were always surrounded by other gaming nerds, where you are always hyped up by the whole passionate sound of random people playing random games in front of the giant gaming machines fed by coins. Many times, you would have a bunch people of wide range being your spectators. This alone would give you a whole new rush of excitement.
Since the birth of the arcade gaming, a lot of magnificent games came and gone but few made it to the hall of unforgettable games that defined a decade of gaming, fashion and culture as well. One of these remarkable games that sing its glory all the way till now and forever is the, The King of Fighters.
What is The King of Fighters?
The King of Fighters was released by SNK in 1994 with the debut self title ‘The King of fighters ‘94’. This game had been released spanning over multiple series until 2004. This franchise was developed originally for the Neo Geo MVS arcade hardware. Neo Geo MVS is a cartridge based gaming system. This was the fourth generation of home video gaming consoles.
The idea of The King of Fighters
Back to the legendary King of fighters, the game is focused on the story , where you enter a competition of The King of Fighters title tournament and you fight your way up till the final challenge. The playable characters were taken from various previous SNK’s games as well as the new King of Fighters characters with each new release of the game.
Multiple spins off this legendary saga was also stretched out to game consoles like Neo Geo Pocket as The King of Fighters R-2 pocket series and on PlayStation 2 as The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact These releases was rad enough as well.
The design of The King of Fighters
Fun fact is, this game series was planned to release as side scrolling beat’em up game. Later down the road they decided not to make it as a side-scrolling beat’em up game and developed and released it as fighting game. This lucrative name was taken out from the SNK’s predecessor game Fatal Fury: King of Fighters. The characters in the 1994 series featured was from other SNK games as Ikari: The Warriors and Psycho Soldier.
This very first release was a massive hit for the SNK. They utilized this inspiration and began spinning off The king of Fighters based on indexing the number the year it is released.