Thursday, April 29th, 2016

Mysterious NeoGeo Fighting Game Discovered is No Longer a Mystery, Game's Creator Found

  

A few weeks back, you might've heard some folks talking about an unknown, unfinished fighting game that was discovered on an old Neo Geo test board. A collector who goes by "NeoTurfMasta" purchased the Neo Geo test board for $750 and started messing around with it, which lead him to discover this mysterious 2D fighting game in prototype form. Well, it didn't take long for the creator of that game to be found, and now we have some solid facts. The game was going to be called "Dragon's Heaven" and was created by Kengo Asai, who previously worked on The Last Blade & Voltage Fighter Gowcaiser.
 

 
After seeing footage of the prototype version of the game appear online, Japanese site ITMedia was able to track down creator Kengo Asai to talk about the unfinished project. Asai revealed that early on in the game's development (1995-1996), the title was known as DarkSeed. The developers weren't able to get the trademark for DarkSeed (as there was already a game titled DarkSeed), so they changed the title to Dragon's Heaven. Asai recalls that "Dark Fantasy" was a popular theme at the time of the game's development, which sets the tone for Dragon's Heaven.
 

 
Dragon's Heaven was planned to have some innovative features for a fighting game, such as having a character pursue a "Lawful", "Neutral", or "Chaotic" morality path. On a playthrough, players would be asked to make decisions after each bout, which would determine their morality path. Furthermore, battles would take place at different times of day, resulting in characters becoming stronger or weaker depending on the time and their morality path.
 


 
"Lawful" characters would get stronger during noon and had access to additional attacks, but became weaker at night. "Chaotic" ones would be strong at night but weak at noon. And "Neutral" would stay consistently at the same strength at all times. Character endings and in-game text would also alter depending on the character's alignment. Dragon's Heaven was also set to feature 2 characters per team as a way to expand on the time of day / morality system.
 

 
After revealing all of the details you just read (above), Creator Kengo Asai made some closing statements about the game's eventual cancellation and salutes the gentleman who discovered his unfinished game:
 

"DarkSeed went through pending for two times due to funding issues, and then faced official cancellation. Development PCBs aren't really supposed to leak out, so there's a part of me that's a bit distraught about that. However, it's been 20 years. As of now, I salute NeoTurfMasta for his discovery, luck, passion, and knowledge. Personally it wasn't all fond memories, so together with my surprise and joy, I also sort of felt the fear of something coming back and haunting me from 20 years ago. I haven't changed that much, but it sure brought back memories of how inexperienced I was back in my youth."

 
And now you know.... Indeed, it's mind-blowing that this 100% unknown game was discovered 2 decades after it was cancelled. Hmm, makes you wonder what other mystery games could be lurking on random Neo Geo test boards out there.
 

Source:  KotakuMMCafeShootBoomBoomNeoGeo.com Forums
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