It's been quite some time since Elecbyte made their last Mugen release (1.1). Since then, a lot has changed in the landscape of fighting games. Elecbyte's return wasn't as impactful as it should have been, the reason was that at the time fighting games and PC gaming in general were experiencing a resurgence. For quite some time, Mugen was the best way for fans of the genre to get their fix, aside from emulation that is. Emulation had it's issues at the time as most emulators were closed-source, even when emulation started to catch up you were still mostly at 16 bit fighting games that while great ports of great games at the time, they were still aged. And then there were some rather obscure ports like the Mortal Kombat games for MS-DOS and Street Fighter Alpha 1 and 2 for Windows 95.
Enter Mugen in the late 90s and now you could not only enjoy an experience tailor-made for PC (although, it required a Pentium processor) but one that gave you the ability to put whatever character, stage or menu you wanted with the music that you wanted and more importantly, for free. This gave us many great experiences taking advantage of the engine, such as Mortal Kombat Project, Dragon Ball VS Street Fighter, KOF Zillion, among others that never saw the light of day. Unfortunately, Elecbyte stopped development of their engine, supposedly to focus on their windows and linux versions but quietly shut down their website in 2003, a windows version was leaked and later hacked to remove it's beta limits, that version served as the base for many projects and hacks.
In 2008, elecbyte announced a comeback and later released version 1.0. However, perhaps due to bad timing, both PC gaming and fighting games began experiencing a resurgence with many prominent franchises getting official releases on PC, such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, among others. Moreover, it was also in that year emulators such as Dolphin and PCSX2 began booting their first commercial games (not to mention all the MAME solutions that even allowed for online play and PS1/Saturn emulation scene which had progressed immensely). In 2015, two years after their last release, Elecbyte once again quietly shut their website down.
Enter Ikemen, an open source engine with online capabilities which can read mugen assets thanks to the reverse engineering made by Suehiro's own language code SSZ, C++ and Lua. What this means is that now, there's a framework from which Mugen projects can now be …
Tue Sep 19, 2023 3:43 pm by kevin