The King of Fighters 15 is the most anticipated fighting game of the year for many in the community though there’s still not a ton we know about it — like where we’ll be able to play it.
There’s a decent chance though that we already have known more than what’s been shown in the recent trailers, at least as it pertains to one unannounced character. Potential spoilers ahead for future roster reveals.
After Tomohiro Nakata was recently announced to be the character designer and main illustrator for KOF15, some fans pointed back to an older SNK employee page for the artist that contains an interesting image.
Nakata appears to be working on a fairly detailed portrait of the giant wrestler Raiden, and what’s intriguing about it is that the image doesn’t appear to have been used since its creation over two years ago.
This led some fans to theorize at the time that it could be concept art for King of Fighters 15 which is seeming more likely now that it hasn’t popped back up over that period of time.
Raiden is much more of a Fatal Fury character than a KOF one, but he did last appear in KOF13 on Kim’s team along with Hwa Jai.
Nakata has worked on art for the mobile game King of Fighters All Star, but as far as we can tell Raiden hasn’t shown up there either.
It may seem weird that SNK would show off a KOF15 asset years before its debut though it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a developer showed parts of games early by taking pictures or videos of employees’ desks whether on purpose or accidental.
That being said, however, there’s also the strong likelihood that this could have been created for an obscure promotional poster or something similar though it’s impossible to say for sure.
No other relevant information can be found on Nakata’s page regarding the image.
We can’t pin down when exactly the page was posted, but the earliest we can find people talking about it and the Raiden portrait is January 2019, which is just a month after KOF15 was confirmed to be in development to investors.
Currently, only Kyo, Shun’ei, K’, Leona, Benimaru and Mai have been confirmed for KOF15 though SNK seems to planning some sort of weekly reveals for the time being.
It certainly would be interesting to see the semi-retired wrestler come back in 3D model form, but I wonder if he’d kick Gang-il off the team to rejoin Kim or whether he’d partner up with a new crew.
