SNK has pulled an ace card that we probably should have seen coming, but somehow did not.
As just announced on Tokyo Game Show, Ken Master and Chun Li, straight out of Street Fighter 6, are visiting South Town as guest characters for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. Ken is slated to arrive in Summer 2025, while Chun Li gets her passport cleared for Winter 2025.
As SNK themselves point out, this matches up with Terry Bogard recently jumping in as a guest character for Street Fighter 6. Terry’s sister-in-law Mai Shiranui is herself slated to arrive in early 2025.
So, of course everyone is thinking of and remembers when these four frequent flyer characters met each other in the Capcom vs. SNK series of video games. Capcom vs. SNK 2 is the most high profile of those games, but that also included some classic Neo Geo Pocket games. And if we’re talking crossovers, of course, Ryu and Terry both met Kazuya Mishima for the first time in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
But there’s a fifth wall level of this crossover that most gamers did not know about for years, and are only learning about more and more with the particulars of these new crossovers. There is a veteran video game designer named Takashi Nishiyama, who is one of the innovators of the Japanese game industry.
In 1984, Nishiyama created an arcade game called Kung-Fu Master for Irem. Also known as Spartan X, Kung-Fu Master is regarded as the first beat-em up game ever made. Nishiyama then moved to Capcom, where he evolved his ideas for beat-em ups to make Trojan in 1986. The following year, he joined Hiroshi Matsumoto in creating the first Street Fighter.
Now, here’s where things get interesting. Nishiyama left Capcom to join SNK, and was not part of the development of the breakout title Street Fighter II. Nishiyama actually helps design the Neo Geo system. He then proceeds to create the first Fatal Fury: King of Fighters, released in 1991.
And yes, Nishiyama had a hand in the creation of both Ryu and Terry Bogard, and he definitely saw Terry as the evolution of the ideas he had conceiving of Ryu. While the rest of the world didn’t really see SNK as Capcom’s competition until the King of Fighters became more popular, Japan, and especially the Japanese game industry, knew about this connection between the two franchises.
For that reason, Fatal Fury was always revered in the Japanese video game industry. Regardless of how the games ultimately did in the market, the developers rightly saw how SNK and Capcom were inextricably connected to each other.
And so, what we have now is the long inevitable expression of that reverence, from a new generation of game developers who grew up on Nishiyama’s games. Incredibly, Nishiyama still does work to this day in his own studio, Dimps, and that means he’s still around to see this gigantic overarching tribute.
With all of that explained, it certainly looks like both Capcom and SNK want to see the fans come out and buy the DLCs for both of these games, perhaps as a test if there’s another big franchise that they could resurrect with all these characters. Here and now, it seems that if the fans really want to get that game back, they need to stay in line and vote, er, buy.
In the meantime, you can watch the official announcement trailer below.
