The King of Fighters
video game series
The King of Fighters (KOF) is a series of fighting games by SNK. It is a crossover featuring characters from various video game series created by the company, as well as original characters created specifically for the series created by Masanori Kuwasashi. The series began with the release of The King of Fighters '94 in 1994, which was initially developed for SNK's Neo Geo MVS arcade hardware and received yearly installments up until its tenth entry, The King of Fighters 2003 — thereafter, SNK moved away from annual The King of Fighters releases and games adopted a Roman numbered format, while simultaneously retiring the use of Neo Geo. The first major installment after this change was The King of Fighters XI (2005) on the Atomiswave arcade board. The series' most recent arcade hardware is the Taito Type X2, first used with the release of The King of Fighters XII (2009) and continues with the latest entry in the series, The King of Fighters XV (2022).
The games' story focuses on the title tournament involving fighters from multiple SNK games. SNK also created original characters to serve as protagonists starting with newcomer Kyo Kusanagi heir of a clan destined to save the world from the Yamata no Orochi demon and fighting characters from Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, among other titles. Later arcs focused on other characters such as K' who can wield fire like Kyo following experiments by the NESTS terrorist organization, Ash Crimson, a trickster interested in obtaining the Three Sacred Treasures and Shun'ei, a young fighter whose powers open the world to other dimensions.
Multiple spin-off games, such as the R duology for the Neo Geo Pocket and Maximum Impact for the PlayStation 2, for example, have also been released. Ports of the arcade games have been released for several video game consoles. There have been multiple cross-over games in which the SNK cast interacted with characters created by Capcom, while some characters have been present as guest characters in other games, such as Mai Shiranui in the Dead or Alive games and Street Fighter 6, Geese Howard in Tekken 7, Kula Diamond in Dead or Alive 6, and Terry Bogard in Fighting EX Layer, Super Smash Bros.
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This entry incorporates text from “The King of Fighters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.