The King of Fighters 15 is the most anticipated fighting game of the year for many in the community, although we still don’t know much about it like where to play it.
However, there’s a fair chance we’ve already known more than what’s shown in the recent trailers, at least since it involves one unannounced character. Potential spoilers on the way for future roster revelations.
After Tomohiro Nakata was recently announced as character designer and lead illustrator for KOF15, some fans pointed back to an older SNK contributor page for the artist that features an interesting image.
Nakata appears to be working on a fairly detailed portrait of the giant wrestler Raiden, and the intriguing thing is that the image doesn’t seem to have been used since its creation over two years ago.
This led some fans to theorize at the time that the concept art for King of Fighters could be 15, which seems more likely now that it hasn’t surfaced during that period.
Raiden is much more of a Fatal Fury character than a KOF character, but he last appeared in KOF13 on Kim’s team, along with Hwa Jai.
Nakata has worked on art for the mobile game King of Fighters All Star, but as far as we can tell, Raiden has not appeared there either.
It may seem strange that SNK would show off a KOF15 item years before its debut, although it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a developer showed game sharing early by taking photos or videos of employees’ desks, either with intentionally or accidentally.
That said, there’s also a good chance this could have been made for an obscure promotional poster or the like, although it’s impossible to say for sure.
There is no other relevant information on Nakata’s page regarding the image.
We can’t pinpoint when exactly the page was posted, but at the earliest we can find people talking about it and the Raiden portrait is January 2019, which is just a month after it was confirmed that KOF15 is in development for investors.
Currently only Kyo, Shun’ei, K ‘, Leona, Benimaru and Mai have been confirmed for KOF15, although SNK seems to be planning some sort of weekly revelations for now.
It would certainly be interesting to see the semi-retired wrestler return in 3D model form, but I wonder if he would kick Gang-il off the team to rejoin Kim or if he would team up with a new squad .