While The King of Fighters did find its way onto one Nintendo system back in the 1990s, it was perhaps the wrong one: the Game Boy.
SNK's popular three-on-three fighter was one of the biggest arcade hits of its era, but ports were mostly limited to 32-bit systems, like the Saturn and PS1, at least initially.
Many Neo Geo fighters made their way to the SNES and Genesis / Mega Drive, including Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown and Art of Fighting, but by the time King of Fighters arrived, the 16-bit generation was on the way out.
Thankfully, homebrew coders are making the dream a reality in the modern era. There's already a KOF port for Sega's 16-bit system in development, and now Rafael Daniel is aiming to prove a point with a Super NES conversion.
"I am officially debunking the myth that the SNES lacks the processing power for fast and complex games without enhancement chips," says the coder on social media. "A faithful KOF port is entirely possible within the 64-Megabit limit I’ve achieved on real hardware."
A short video is shown with Iori and Ryo animated against a background from King of Fighters '96. Daniel explains that it is designed to explore the limitations of the console before proper development begins. "My goal right now is to stress the hardware to its absolute limit to see just how much data throughput it can handle; optimization will come later."
Would you be keen to see how King of Fighters plays on the SNES? Let us know with a comment.
Thanks to jygsaw for the tip!