This Week in Retro: The King of Fighters ’95/2000 [1995/2000] (with audio bonus)

This week's patron-exclusive column contains an audio element—let us know what you think in the comments! Is this something you'd like to see (or, uhh, hear) more of?—Jeremy

July 25/26, 1995/2000: The King of Fighters Dabbles in Fire and Ice

by Diamond Feit

This week we have the privilege of celebrating a double anniversary, as two different King of Fighters games came out almost precisely five years apart. Both built on the preceding incarnation, and both added memorable characters to an already-popular roster. But while one title was a major step forward as the series headed for new heights, the other turned out to be more of a shark-jump, as dark times for both developer SNK and KOF were nigh.

If you're new to The King of Fighters, it all began in '94 when SNK fused their two concurrent fighting game franchises into a crossover collaboration, filled with characters from the company's earlier arcade games and a couple original creations for good luck. One of those originals was Kyo Kusanagi (pictured above, left), a schoolboy with the power of flames who was the leader of the Japan team and presented as the main hero of the game.

The King of Fighters '95 came out less than a year after the first game, and not too much had changed. The story is still centered on a tournament featuring eight teams of three fighters, overseen by a madman named Rugal Bernstein (who seems remarkably alive, considering the ending of the previous tournament). In a major shift, however, players can now choose "edit mode" and select any three fighters they wish rather than stick with the predetermined eight teams as seen in KOF ’94. The two CPU boss characters (Rugal and Saishu Kusanagi, Kyo's father) are also selectable, meaning players have their pick of 30 different characters for a total of 4060 different team combinations. (They even boast of this on the back of the box, even though they undersell it with the promise of "over 2000 teams".)

But even more than shifting the way the characters are chosen, SNK shook up the otherwise stable roster (seven of the eight teams in KOF ’95 are unchanged from ’94) by replacing the American "sports" team with a new "rivals" trio. This consisted of Billy Kane from Fatal Fury, Eiji Kisaragi from Art of Fighting 2, and a brand-new character named Iori Yagami (pictured above, right). Iori has a strange look; his hair is bright red and hangs over his face yet somehow does not get into his eyes; he wears a tiny jacket over a gigantic shirt with tails that extend to his knees; and his pant legs are tied together with a string.

I fell in love with him right away.

Fighting games have always had "rival" characters since Karate Champ had White Karate Guy and Red Karate Guy. Ryu and Ken (speaking of white and red karate guys) are essentially identical to one another in the original Street Fighter II, while Scorpion and Sub-Zero look the same in Mortal Kombat but have distinct special moves. In KOF ’95 Kyo and Iori are presented as opposite sides of the same coin. Both men (boys?) use flames, but Iori's fire is an unnatural purple. Kyo wears a school uniform with a sun on the back, but Iori has wild hair/clothes with a moon on the back. Both have fireball/dragon punch moves akin those seen in Street Fighter II, but Kyo can leap into the air and kick opponents skyward as Iori can dash along the ground and juggle them with punches.

Aside from this pair of newfound frenemies and unlocking the ability to remix teams, KOF ’95 sticks closely to the first game's ideals. It's most radical feature might be existing at all; by releasing a second game within a year, SNK was making a statement that this series would be an annual one, a practice already common for sports games but an unheard-of promise in the fighting game world for sure.

Leaping five years ahead, SNK released The King of Fighters 2000 on July 26, a little over a year after KOF ’99 had introduced the new "striker" system and a new lead character for the franchise, K'. In 2000, it was time for K' to receive his own Iori-style rival, but this time SNK zigged instead of zagged and introduced a girl named Kula Diamond whose combat method in official supplemental materials is described as "Anti-K' arts." In other words, she fights fire with ice.

K' and Kula look more alike than you might expect: Both clearly share a taste for bodysuits, though Kula's outfit looks like it breathes better (her standing animation shows frost falling from her body). Their movesets have some overlap—both are fond of the "one-inch punch"—but their powers don't function quite the same. K' can kick a blast of fire clear across the screen. Kula's ice breath doesn't have that kind of range, although she can summon a gust of icy wind that fills the entire screen.

Kula proved to be a popular addition to the KOF family, and she's been a recurring face ever since. However, the biggest change in KOF 2000 was to the year-old striker system. In KOF ’99, players designated one of their four teammates before each match as a "striker" who could jump in and interfere. However, strikers could only be summoned a few times per match, and only when the active player character was standing still, limiting their strategic potential. KOF 2000 blew the doors off the striker system by allowing strikers to be summoned at any time during the match and enabled players to recharge their striker bar, allowing for more overall striker opportunities in every contest.

In an even bigger move, KOF 2000 also gives every single character an alternate striker (literally dubbed "another striker") which players can select before each match. These alternates are not just the same character performing a different move, they are different characters altogether; in many cases, characters from other SNK games. Terry Bogard's another striker is Geese Howard, Yuri Sakazaki's another striker is Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown, Vanessa's another striker is Fio from Metal Slug, and so on. While these characters are not fully playable on their own, these cameos turn KOF 2000 into a madcap, "Hey, I remember THEM!" celebration of the extended NEO•GEO library—one-upping Capcom's contemporaneous Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 and hinting at the direction Nintendo would take with the budding Super Smash Bros. franchise.

KOF ’95 and 2000 arrived at two very different points in SNK history, despite a gap of just five years. When I first saw KOF ’95, I was excited by the new character and wondered where the series would go next, even if I felt like not enough changes were made to justify purchasing the game (remember that NEO•GEO cartridges fetched hundreds of dollars at launch). But when KOF 2000 came out, as much fun as it was to play, I knew the writing was on the wall for SNK. The company had been sold earlier that year to pachinko maker Aruze, who had promptly abandoned the Neo Geo Pocket Color platform and closed SNK's American offices. While I feared it was the end of all things Neo Geo, that turned out to be premature. Nevertheless, KOF 2000 would turn out to be the final game in the series produced by the original SNK I came to love; that company would go bankrupt the following year. There would be a revival as assets were bought and sold, and the KOF series would live on (XV is allegedly in development at this very moment); but back in 2000, as we all celebrated a new millennium, I was more worried about what we were losing.