Its hard to believe that the King of Fighters series has been around for 30 years now. The KOF series is one that has been highly overlooked within the fighting genre of gaming for decades mainly because it appeals to a niche audience of gamers more so than franchises like Mortal Kombat, Tekken or Street Fighter. King of Fighters is a Capcom creation with the original game being released in ’94 for arcade systems Neo Geo AES along with Neo Geo CD. King of Fighters ’94 was different from your typical fighting games because players were forced to choose one of eight teams consisting of three characters each. KOF ’94 had multiple teams of characters from countries like Italy, China, Korea, Japan, America, Brazil, United Kingdom and Mexico face off against each other. The main character of KOF ’94 was Kyo Sakazaki and the main antagonist was Rugal Bernstein who turned his defeated opponents into stone statues for his throne room. KOF ’94 was legendary because it marked the birth of a 2D fighting franchise that is still going on to this day. Rugal Bernstein is considered to be one of the most notorious bosses within the KOF franchise along with Orochi who eventually made his video game debut in KOF ’97 as the final boss.

KOF ’94 had a pretty cool intro but not nearly as good as some of its successor and a tutorial that showed newcomers the basic on how the play the game itself. KOF ’94 featured some characters that were popular in the Fatal Fury series like Mai Shiranui, Joe Higashi along with The Bogard twins. KOF ’94 also featured some top characters from Art of Fighting series like Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia which who many SNK fans were familiar with. The King of Fighters series is basically a crossover between Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting with new characters being added which is why the series has continued to appeal to its niche audience for the past couple of decades. KOF ’94 was a pretty fun fighting title during the mid 90’s but it got overshadowed in countries like America due to the growing popularity of other franchises like Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Street Fighter. While the 3 vs 3 elimination style team battles in KOF ’94 was something that stood out in comparison to other fighting titles; the gameplay mechanics were not quite as good as the Fatal Fury series. Despite, not being the best entry within its series KOF ’94 was the beginning of something special that many people were not aware of back in the day.