Trivia / Eternal Champions

• Dueling Works: With Killer Instinct in terms of being dark and violent fighting games made by the leading console manufacturers at the time as a Follow the Leader answer to Mortal Kombat, with outlandish character designs and gallons of Rule of Cool.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The original game can't be included in any Sega Genesis compilation because its graphic content would force the ESRB to rate said collection with an "M" rating and the individual Wii Virtual Console re-release was delisted in 2019, leaving Steam and the Sega Genesis Mini as the only options to buy the game legally.
  • Challenge from the Dark Side hasn't seen ANY re-release since its original 1995 debut. Sega CD consoles are notorious for their high failure rate and Sega CD discs are very susceptible to disc rot due to their age and manufacturing issues during the early days of CD technology. You are better off using an emulator to play it again.
• Referenced by...: Hip Hop group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony sampled the "Bad Ending" theme and "Character Bios" on their album E 1999 Eternal for the tracks "Crossroads" and "Eternal", respectively.
• Screwed by the Network: Despite strong sales and an interest from other companies to create toys, comics, cartoons and other tie-in merchandise, Sega of Japan put a stop to Eternal Champions early on. They wanted Virtua Fighter to be the company's flagship fighting game franchise and believed that Eternal Champions would eat into its potential player base and lower Virtua Fighter's sales. To this end, they forbid Sega of America from creating a full sequel for the Sega CD, leading to the Challenge from the Dark Side enhancement of the first game, before completely giving the franchise the ax before the Sega Saturn was released. This would come back to bite Sega of Japan as there hasn't been a new Virtua Fighter game that isn't an Updated Re-release since Virtua Fighter 5.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to this interview with former Sega of America employee Scott Berfield, Eternal Champions was originally going to be much more humorous and over the top. Characters would have been affectionate parodies of various superhero archetypes (which explains quite a bit about Larcen), while the training mode would have consisted of minigames where you could beat the crap out of knife-wielding dwarves. Berfield left SoA sometime after the project was greenlit; it was passed down to Michael Latham, who decided to restart the project and turn it into the Eternal Champions we have today.
  • Shadow Yamoto was a character design from the game's original concept that was kept for the final product.
  • An early preview of the Sega Genesis game in Issue #49 of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) had showed Blast and Chin Wo among the original nine fighters at the title screen and in the game itself, highly implying and indicating that they were originally intended to be part of the main roster, but the two of them were removed from the final version of the game due to memory limitations, though the duo would eventually be made as hidden playable characters in the Sega CD sequel Challenge from the Dark Side. Another fact to this is that both MidKnight and Jetta's stages from the Genesis game were originally meant for Blast and Chin Wo respectively (a jungle village stage set during The Vietnam War and an old Chinese temple stage) and from within the Sega CD game, the former duo had gained their own new stages (a scientific laboratory and a circus tent) while the latter duo were given the old, albeit newly modified ones from the Genesis game.
  • Sega had a third game, Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter, in pre-production for the Sega Saturn after Challenge from the Dark Side became...well, as much of a hit on the Sega CD as anything really could. Final Chapter would have featured a faction-oriented storyline, with characters supporting either the Eternal Champion or the Dark Champion in an effort to allow good or evil (the "Infernals") to triumph. Each victory would lock the opposing faction out from influencing a specific time period forever. Sega cancelled the game, however, when the company feared it would draw attention away from Virtua Fighter.
  • Series creator Michael Latham claimed that there were numerous offers to make a comic book and even a cartoon series based on the show, but much like The Final Chapter, said proposals were nixed by Sega to prevent overshadowing Virtua Fighter (the latter getting a one-shot promotional comic and later an Animated Adaptation).

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