Trivia / World Heroes

• Cash-Cow Franchise: World Heroes was this to ADK in The '90s.
• Franchise Ownership Acquisition: SNK acquired the rights to the franchise in 2003 upon ADK's liquidation.
• Revival by Commercialization: Happened to the series after SNK Playmore bought ADK and its properties: their characters appear in various new games (NeoGeo Battle Coliseum, Days of Memories, SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS, Neo Geo Ultimate Shooting, etc.) and the old games were re-released for new consoles (World Heroes Anthology on PlayStation 2 and the 4 games on Virtual Console/Xbox Live Arcade/PlayStation Network).
• Troubled Production: The Sega Genesis version of the first game. Sega Midwest was scammed out of a large sum of money by the lead developer, who then disappeared. Thus the job was handed to an amateur programmer who had to program the game in an unrealistically short amount of time, almost all by himself. The result was an inevitable Porting Disaster.
• Vaporware:
  • ADK planned a game for Neo Geo Pocket Color World Heroes Pocket to be released in 2000, but it was cancelled.
  • A Sega CD port of the first game was also in the works, but eventually cancelled. Considering what happened to the Sega Genesis port, it was probably for the better.
  • ADK had plans for a 3D instalment for the Hyper Neo Geo 64 hardware, but this was canceled pretty early on due to the hardware's failure. With the only surviving work on it being a concept model for Hanzo.
• What Could Have Been: The Neo Geo CD fan disc ADK World has Concept Art of the first two games, which shows early character ideas:
  • For the first World Heroes, Tutankhamun, Al Capone, Billy the Kid, Emperor Nero, Miyamoto Musashi, and Napoléon. The last two are Jack the Ripper and Hattori Hanzō: the second was the only character which made it to the final game, and Jack would make an appearance two games later.
  • For World Heroes 2, Yagyu Jubei, "Azteca" (a Jaguar warrior), "Huracán" (a Masked Luchador), "Eris" (an Erick proto-Distaff Counterpart), "Graham" (a Muay Thai fighter), Sinbad, Siegfried, Dracula, "Heinrich" (an English fencer), Ramesses II, "Reala" (an indian woman), "Mucha" (yet another Erick distaff counterpart), and the more alien-looking "Gozu" and "King".

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