SNK has announced that a new version of its popular fighting game series Fatal Fury or Garō Densetsu (Legend of the Hungry Wolf in Japan) is in production. A teaser trailer was released after the grand finale of The King of Fighters 15 tournament at Evo 2022.
Only one piece of artwork was released, it depicts Rock Howard, Billy Kane, and possibly Andy Bogard. This news comes after an earlier Twitch stream where the creator revealed a lot about the development of the original Fatal Fury / Garou release and the cancellation of Garou 2. It was revealed that Garou 2 was only halfway through development at the time. Director Nobuyuki Kuroki expressed his intent to revive the series and even shared designs and concept sketches for both returning and new characters.
In July 2022, Twitter user 2021kduck discovered two old CDs belonging to an old SNK developer, the CDs contained assets for Fatal Fury 2 / Garou 2, which shook the fighting game community. 2021kduck manually extracted the data and sprites and shared them online, revealing that there were many new attack animations and things in the works, though most were left unfinished. The files even contained a new sprite for Andy Bogard, further reinvigorating interest in a potential sequel for this dormant series.
Fatal Fury characters have been making regular appearances in the latest SNK title King of Fighters XV, and in March 2022 and May 2022, two downloadable content packs have been released which contain many Fatal Fury characters such as Rock Howard, Geese Howard, and Billy Kane. Kim Kaphwan was also recently introduced to the series roster during Evo 2022, he will be arriving in season two of the game, along with Darli Dagger and Shingo Yabuki from Samurai Shodown and the Art of Fighting series' respectively.
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Fatal Fury was a prominent fighting series back in the '90s and was known for the unique gimmick of making fighters battle across two different planes, with later entries experimenting with newer gimmicks such as Ring-Outs, 'Deadly Rave Super Combo' and 'Just Defend Healing Block'. The series chronicles the rise of the hungry wolf Terry Bogard and the simultaneous fall of the criminal empire of Geese Howard. The latest official entry was Garou: Mark of the Wolves in 1999 on the Neo Geo.