The sprite-based game that predated the Street Fighter 6 features

Did you know there was a game that would have had almost all of the same elements featured in the World Tour mode of Street Fighter 6, but all the way back in 2009? I’m talking about a player created male or female avatar that traveled the world, learning the special attacks from various fighting game masters, that you could change the look, and costume of. Plus online play, and an engrossing story.

There would be random encounters on the street to help you level up, and earn items for your character, etc. What made it revolutionary was that all of this was going to be sprite based. This game was called the King of Fighters (KOF) World. A 3D version was known as King of Fighters Online, developed by Triple A Games, and Dragonfly, a Korean studio. The more important, and unrelated 2D version was called the King of Fighters World, this was developed by Shanda.

Shanda Games started development on The King of Fighters World in 2009, and by 2011 they stopped. They cited “lack of market interest” this sounded to me like most fans didn’t want a KOF MMO. They wanted a fighting game, and not a brawler, even if it used classic sprites. I'm sorry that they insisted on going the MMO route. I'm sure a console title would have been a more popular global release. I talked about the long road to development on this title on this blog. During the brawler series I covered KOF World, KOF Online, and even Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons. Three titles that showed tremendous promise, but sort of fizzled out despite the IPs they were based on. It was a shame really. I think I would have enjoyed playing a classic sprite-based brawler, but with moves from the various KOF characters.

In 2017 a new studio announced that they were working on KOF World. China-based Ledo Interactive was developing, but SNK Playmore was still in charge of the IP. The dev team said they were 75% complete with the project, there was a closed beta, and four new characters were being adding, along with the KOF regulars.

Three were announced, one guy, and two girls. The first was Miura Taka, a high society character, and master of the rare Taka style of fighting. He developed fire powers, and thus studied under Saisyu Kusanagi (father of Kyo Kusanagi) when he was 13-years-old. Because he used the Taka style of fighting his attacks were actually different than KOF regulars Kyo, Saisyu, or Shingo Yabuki. The third character announced was Hoshino Karol, a model with Psycho Powers similar to Athena Asamiya.

The second exclusive character introduced was Faith Brown, she idolized Heidern the organizer of the Ikari Warriors team. The Ikari senior members were Ralph Jones, and Clark Still. Heidern’s daughter Leona was also a member. Faith, and Leona knew each other, and both learned to assassinate targets with Heidern’s tutelage. Ms. Brown was now a professional assassin herself, teaching others how to be killers. As such she was presented in a sort of disciplinarian / dominatrix look. I wonder how a fight between her and Street Fighter's Poison would turn out.

So what ever became of the titles that could have beaten SF6 to the punch? Sadly no other news turned up by the end of 2017, or to this day. At least not to the best of my knowledge. In typical MMO developer Ledo-Interactive seemed to disappear overnight. Maybe the game comes out on mobile phones tomorrow, who knows? Anyhow, that’s all I have to say about the games that could have been. Were there any titles you were interested in that were cancelled after long development cycles? Let me know in the comments section please. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!