“In Mexico in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, three of every two drug stores had a KOF arcade,” said Jose Saucedo, a former games journalist and social media manager. From arcades in metropolitan hubs to small local drug stores, the Neo Geo was a common fixture on many street corners. And so Neo Geo arcade cabinets proliferated in Latin America, King Of Fighters along with it. SNK provided affordable, accessible entertainment to those even in the most rural areas.īy the dawn of the 1990s, arcades became the de facto method of consuming video games in those areas.
Game machines were only available in electronics stores serving upper-class consumers in larger cities, he said. “The Mexican economy was actually better than it is today, but it wasn’t as easy to get consoles,” said player and tournament organiser NeoPenny, who asked that we not use his real name out of privacy concerns. Jose Ramon Navarrete (R) plays King of Fighters. And arcade owners could pass that savings on to the consumers when it came time to put in their 25 cents - or their 50 centavos. This meant that upgrading to the latest, hottest game was simply a matter of spending a few hundred dollars on a new cartridge, not thousands on a new machine. While it looked like a standard arcade cabinet, Neo Geo ran its games from cartridges that could be easily swapped out by an arcade owner. The Neo Geo platform that the games ran on was essentially a cartridge-based console for arcades.
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The annualized series was an all-star mashup of characters from SNK’s many different fighting game franchises for its Neo Geo arcade platform, pulling its cast from Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and the like.Īs these earlier SNK franchises had something of a loose story continuity, it was easy for the developer to cobble together thin plot threads for crossover mayhem, as well as yank characters from the company’s pre-Neo Geo 1980s output like Ikari Warriors and Athena to expand the rosters even further. King of Fighters is a fighting game series that began in 1994 with the very on-the-nose title of King of Fighters ’94. Largely, it boils down to the one thing it always does: money. And nearly all of them told me the same things, with only incremental details shifting from one source to the next. Dozens of players and tournament organisers from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and more wanted to tell their stories. Taking to Twitter to find some answers, my mentions and inbox were flooded with responses. Getting to the bottom of fact versus assumed internet wisdom can be challenging, especially for something ingrained in genre circles since the early days of Street Fighter II’s success.
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Fire up online emulation matchmaking software like Fightcade, and the location flags next to the majority of players are from these regions, too. The greater the size of the tournament, the higher likelihood of spotting players who travelled from Mexico, Chile, or Brazil. Posts on larger fighting game forums like Shoryuken over the years have told many anecdotal accounts of the scene, and speculation as to why the franchise has proliferated in the region.Īccording to the players, tournament organisers, and media personalities who spoke to Kotaku for this story, King Of Fighters has a curious ubiquity that has become part of the cultural identity for Latin American gamers.įighting game tournaments for KOF around the United States frequently have Latin American representation. It’s well understood in the fighting game community that King of Fighters is a particular passion for many players from Mexico and other Latin American countries. VGMuseum)” loading=”lazy” > King of Fighters 2003.
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