The King Of Fighters

About The King Of Fighters

The King of Fighters (ザ・キング・オブ・ファイターズ, Za Kingu obu Faitāzu), officially abbreviated KOF, is a series of fighting games by SNK Playmore, formerly SNK. The series was originally developed for SNK's Neo-Geo MVS arcade hardware, which served as the main platform for the series until 2004, when SNK retired the MVS in favor of the Atomiswave arcade board and will move the series to the Taito Type X2 with the release of The King of Fighters XII. Ports of the arcade games and original The King of Fighters games have been released for the Neo Geo CD, Neo Geo Pocket, Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, N-Gage, Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast, PlayStation and PlayStation 2, and Xbox. One of the most recent games in the series are The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact series.

The King of Fighters '94 introduces the series' signature 3-man team system. A player chooses a team of three characters, then determines the order to play them in. Each fight consists of up to 5 rounds, and each round ends when one of the two fighters is knocked out; the remaining fighter stays and faces the opponent's next character. The gameplay of King of Fighters '95 was left largely intact from 94. The major change SNK was to allow players to select any combination of characters to fight with, as opposed to the concrete teams that players were confined to in the previous game.

In the The King of Fighters '99, a new addition was added to the game. It introduces the striker system which allows the team to have fourth member that is able to help his teammates in the middle of the fight and attack the opponent. The King of Fighters 2001 kept the Striker assist system from the previous two KOF games, but added a new twist to it - the ability to adjust how many Strikers a team could have. While teams in 1999 and 2000 are limited to selecting one teammate as an assist, now teams could have up to 3 assist characters, or none at all.