What's your KI story?

So back in 1998, I was around 7-8 years old and at the time I was still playing on the NES. One day, my parents came home with a SNES and it changed my life forever. They had bought a SNES with a few games, some of the better ones or at least the ones that many people love and remember: Megaman X, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, F-Zero, Gradius 3, Mortal Kombat 2, Super Metroid and Super Mario World. (I would eventually get other games)

Among them was a black cartridge with a robot on it’s picture and I thought “this must be an action game and that robot is either the main character that I’ll be using or one of the enemies”. Never expected it to be a fighting game so I was quite surprised when I started playing it.

As I played it, I couldn’t help but be amazed by everything: the graphics, characters, music, sound effects etc. and so this game instantly clicked with me and I couldn’t stop playing it. I remember those wonderful days as a kid in the 3rd grade, couldn’t wait to come back home after school to boot up my SNES and start playing, I really miss those days.

Obviously as time went on, I found interest in other games when I got a PS1 and kind of forgot about KI although not completely as a few years later in 2005 I buried my SNES out of other belongings that were in boxes and started playing it again, this time introducing it to my younger brother. Then I wondered “what happened to this game?” it surprised me that KI never continued after KI2 and gold.

As the years went on by, I waited and waited while doing some research on KI about everything like the characters, moves, development team and I also watched all sorts of videos about KI on youtube including tributes, compilations and walkthroughs. Then I stopped waiting around 2011.

In 2012, I found MaximilianDood’s youtube channel thanks to my brother and found some interest in his Assist Me series but never really paid too much attention to his channel. A year later in 2013, the return of KI was announced and as you can imagine, I was emotional, I did cry a little bit but I was also very happy yet a little skeptical because I was happy KI was back but at the same time I thought “oh no, they’re going to ruin another classic” so I was careful.

I saw Max’s reaction to the KI teaser at E3 2013 and started to pay more attention to his videos. I’ll be honest though, it wasn’t until Thunder was revealed when I finally made the choice to buy this game eventually, as his return made me excited for the rest of the cast, couldn’t wait to see Fulgore, Cinder, Spinal and the others.

Anyhow, this is how I found out about KI a long time ago and why it means so much to me. What’s your KI story? How did you hear about KI? And how much does KI mean to you? I’m very interested in reading what you all have to say so please discuss.

5 Likes

I was on holiday in January, the only time I could play one credit per day for 20 days in a touristic city (where I’m living now). I was 11 and saw KI for the first time. I was forbidden to play Mortal Kombat because of it’s violence. When my mother saw KI she thought it was about robots and monsters figthing so she didn’t mind. I fell in love with the intro, music, most characters resembling movies I loved and…there was a werewolf. I found my game :blush:

It’s a game that helped me to do lot of catarsis, beating the arcade and some players, feeling fresh and happy to go and do other thing, as, for instance, riding my bike. I was pretty quiet when playing back then, very proffesional. Now people online mash too much and I get kind of upset, lol. But I guess is because I’m older and no one is playing at me face to face like we used to do.

4 Likes

I was 14 when the original KI came out. Back in the days when arcade-going was still a thing, I remember seeing the new KI machine. Well, more like I saw a HUGE crowd of people watching this amazingly-beautiful looking game. The graphics were awesome, the aesthetic was dark but very stylish (MK was “dark” but I never liked the visual style), the characters were so unique and varied (no other game had anything even REMOTELY close to the variety of character designs), the music sounded cool, and … goddamn, the combos were mind-blowing… I mean, people regularly pulling off 35 hit combos? Are you freakin’ nuts? What madness is this?

I was only mediocre at fighting games (though I enjoyed them) so I was honestly too timid to try to play. With crazy crowds at all times around the game I didn’t want to go up there and look like an absolute idiot. So I just watched with amazement. Took a long time before the crowds died down for me to work up the “courage” to play the game haha. But I started playing and I had a blast. I ended up playing primarily as Sabrewulf and did his Howl move all the time which added extra hits to his Roll and Claw Spin and the AI was simply unable to block the extra hits. Like it was programmed to block the two normal hits, but just wasn’t programmed to block the two extra hits at the end. So I could cheese my way to Eyedol easily. When I got to Eyedol I got stomped usually (though I did beat him a few times). I ended up getting the SNES port of the game and me and my brother had a blast with it.

Not owning an Xbox One, I never got on the KI 2013 train. Only when it was finally ported to Windows that I was able to get in on this and I’m loving the game. I’m still only a mediocre fighting game player – my reaction times and move execution just suck, sadly (though I understand the technical aspects of fighting games much more now compared to 14 year old me), but it’s still great fun despite my suckitude haha.

5 Likes

To make my credit/coin worth the time I was going to play I would do this: take a videogame magazine with some info about the game (they weren’t that hard to get by that time) because they usually had the “special moves list”. I would take pencil and paper and draw an “arcade stick”. With that in mind I studied by heart the special moves, then I would mimic some combos. After that, in real life, the first thing I did was trying out the special moves and then the combos. You can imagine I started winning and learning faster once I had that base to keep on going. That’s why I still have that feeling of not liking to take a fighting game not knowing anything, but long ago I didn’t have much chances to play, so I had to make it worth.

2 Likes

My experience with KI came around the late 90’s (I can’t remember the exact year) when my dad first bought the N64. The first game he bought for that console was KI Gold, and when I first saw Tusk and Sabrewulf fought in Sabrewulf’s Castle, I was immediately hooked by the mere idea of seeing unique humans and monsters dueling against each other, and it became my first video game I’ve ever played in my whole life.

At first, I was quite clueless on how to play KI Gold (I was a bit of a ditzy kid most of the time), until I pay more attention through my older brother and some of his friends that I eventually got the hang of it and would played against my brother whenever we had the chance.

We mostly played every character, but our most preferred ones were Jago and Sabrewulf, I did however had quite a liking towards TJ Combo, and felt highly spoiler[/spoiler] attracted towards Maya.

But fun as it was, it did left me a few scarring memories because of the Ultimates. Ever since I first saw Sabrewulf do his bat ultimate on Jago in his castle, I had nightmares about those particular moves when they randomly occur. The darkening of the stage and creepy ambient sound left me terrified until I got older and began to ease up.

When KI went into dormant, I pretty much moved on towards other games, didn’t really give a damn if the series was going to return until I saw KI 2013 on Xbox One’s lineup. I was quite mixed but hopeful to see what this would become, and all be damned, I’m so pleased to see KI becoming the ideal fighting game of this generation it has been in the last 3 years.

2 Likes

Oddly, i was not a big fighting game guy, but i was the ‘hangout-at-the-arcade’ guy. I dropped so much money into that old X-men arcade game and anything i could shoot something, it wasn’t even funny. But KI was one that there was this one guy that was really good with Thunder and i just watched for a couple days. I remember i gave it a shot and got murdered for my quarters.

Then, of all places, a local dollar store installed two arcade cabinets in their store. One was a Tekken game (i think) and the other was KI. I got to play it more, still sucked at it though. (I was told much later in life i sucked probably because i hold arcade sticks very different…)

Anyway, it got me into fighters and competitive games but right around the time that arcades were dying to home consoles. I played my fair share of them up until 2013 when Double Helix’s Killer Instinct was announced. From there, i just kinda watched again because it was exclusive to the One, and i hadn’t bought a console since the 360.

1 Like

I saw the new Fulgore…I bought an Xbox one

1 Like

Most probably know my KI “story” as it weree, but I’ll tell it again anyway.

My Ki story pretty much starts with the new console generations (though I’d heard about KI before I’d never really paid it much mind I don’t think). The game was announced, I was sort of interested but I don’t really remember what I thought at the time.

I really started studying KI around the time Mortal Kombat X was announced - I knew I wanted to play that game and KI and due to accessibility, the PS4 wasn’t really looking like anything interesting. I preordered MKX for Xbox ONe, then got the console about a week or two before, so had pre-purchased KI (the f2p version) and started downloading that as soon as I could. My research paid off as I knew at least vaguely how the game worked mechanics wise. I bought Season 1 and 2 in rapid succession, then got Killer at the beginning of this year for the first time in S2, then got it a second time during S3, now doing a third run, beat Boss Shago (might be the first totally blind player to do it), trained players like @Jukesy1992 and had help from @Blindgamer102 and was partially responsible for the introduction of the audio slider in the middle of Season 2.

KI has a large amount of meaning for me as it’s the most playable fighting game that hasn’t been extensively modified to be accessible on the platforms of choice. Skullgirls has accessibility features built in but they were secifically introduced to make the game fully playable. KI doesn’t have this kind of support yet but I hope in future it might.

1 Like

First off when I was a kid there weren’t many arcades around where I lived, so I rarely got to play any. But I had heard about KI from Nintendo Power, and they did a masterful job of hyping me up for it. Then there was that nefarious Donkey Kong Country VHS featurette that mailed off to members, and at the very end they showed about a 2 second glimpse of Thunder landing a Sammamish on someone while the room was running at the camera yelling " not until next year!!"
Later they sent out these elongated character cards that had their moves and a couple of basic combos on the back…which made no sense to me because I’d only played SF2 & MK at the time. I was in band in school and we had a trip coming up, so I took them with me in hopes that I might see the game, and sure enough we went to a mall that had an arcade, and KI was in there. I quartered up, laid all my cards up on the machine so I could read their moves while I played…aaaaaand proceeded to get my @ss kicked by a local that had already played it quite a bit. Oh he tried to help me some, using a foreign arcade FG lingo…
“Here, hit quarter circle forward 3.”
“3?..there’s not a button labeled 3…do you mean Heavy Punch?”
“No look, 1,2,3…4,5,6…”

Anyway, sometime later came the SNES version and at the time my dad had his own car garage, and he was contracted to maintain the Schwan’s trucks for our town, and he let my brother and I help once a month to change their oil & lube the doors on the sides of the truck, and after a month or 2 I had saved up enough money from helping out to get KI. After that about every day for the next 2 years I climbed the arcade ladder in both KI & MK2.
KI2 I had hardly seen in the arcade, and KI Gold I had only rented, so I played it a little but only enough to know that it was really different from KI1 and it was going to take longer than I had to understand it.

KI 2013, I had watched several E3’s hoping for its return, but they always ended as a dissapointment in that regard. Then in 2013 it happened…and I was busy changing a blowout diaper for my youngest son. :unamused: And it was the only part of that E3 presentation that I missed.
I got an XB1 as well as KI right after Spinal was released…and have been playing KI ever since.

TL;DR…well you lazy so & so…I poured my heart out! Go back and read my post, and think about how inconsiderate you are!! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2 Likes