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Sega Saturn
Kumite: The Fighter's Edge
Platform: Saturn
Publisher: Konami
Developer: 47-Tek
The Basics
Kumite: The Fighter's Edge was to be a 360 degree fighting game with realistic characters, fluid motion during combat, and fighters who reflected physical damage during battles. The game was touted as the next generation fighting game - something to move the genre along and break the mold.
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Kumite was definitely not your kick-punch-block type fighter. Instead it was based on various types of real martial arts fighting styles such as Tai Kwon Do among others. The game's graphics were a step forward at the time, with complete 360-degree character rendering for full character movements in 3D. This would've allowed you to sidestep your opponent's attacks and also cross into and around him or her to allow you to perform side and rear attacks.
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The character design was also relatively innovative. The fighters were to be rendered with enough detail that you would be able to measure at what location on the fighter's body you landed your attack, and to what degree you injured him or her. This would have been done through animated texture mapping. Bruises would have actually appeared after three degrees of damage.
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Also, the combat moves would have streamed in from the CDs in sets. And there were special moves planned for the game that you wouldn't have had access to but would have found out about through codes. Then you could have loaded them into the game on the fly. Some of the special sets were to be weapons moves, so if you were playing an opponent and he or she hit a special set of buttons, a whole new set of moves for this weapon would have loaded.
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At one point, we learned of about ten of the characters: Karambi, whom the story centered around; Marshall; two female characters, Lu and Yamashita; Morgan; Reese; Master Lo; Pal; Otaki; and Kim. And where would these guys fight? Their neighborhoods. Karambi, for example, would've battled in the mountains of Indonesia and Marshall would've faced-off in Arizona. The environments were compared to those in Tekken and Soul Edge. 47-Tek also had some interesting plans for the sound and music.
Kumite wouldn't have been a fatality-wielding, finishing move fest, but rather a realistic fighter, focusing on actual martial arts. The game also would have included special characters and moves and different endings for the various characters.
WHAT HAPPENED?
An anonymous source at Konami told EGM, "There will never be a Kumite. That product, as you readers know, will never see the light of day. You may see some of its ideas surface in other products, though." Kumite's development team was dissolved and there are other issues that "people really don't need to know about," according to the EGM source.
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