Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter

Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter was an unreleased game planned for the Sega Saturn by the former member of Sega of America, Michael Latham. The game only made it past the first 20 pages of concept art before being forcefully canceled by Sega of Japan, seeing the game as competition for the Saturn version of AM2's Virtua Fighter.

Cancellation

“	Michael Latham stated in a 2005 interview by Sega-16.com: Sega of Japan felt that Eternal Champions was keeping Virtua Fighter from being more successful in the US and that it would be better if the company focused on only one franchise...and as Sega is a Japanese company, the Japan side won. It was a crushing blow, and was the only time in working nearly a decade at Sega I considered quitting. I mainly stayed with the hope to change that decision, but sadly never could. Even when we did the NetFighter project for Heat.net, we weren't able to use the Eternal characters as a hidden bonus. From Japan's view the game never existed, in spite of its stellar sales and even offers to do comic books and a cartoon around it.	„

Planned Features

Michael Latham states later in the interview what he had originally intended for the game:

“	I had about 20 pages of the design when I got informed of its cancellation, but as I told you, I had the basic story always worked out from the beginning. The idea was that just like the Eternal Champions, there was a second set of fighters fighting to regain their lives (called the Infernals), and this created a certain balance to the time line. The story of the Saturn version was that a third force, called Chaos, comes in and starts ripping apart the time line and the two sides have to work together fight this new threat. So you can choose the side of the Eternals or Infernals, good and evil, but not black and white as you think, and then fight to fix the damaged time-line. What was the real cool part was that things you did affected the timeline in real-time in the game, and so it would effect the characters looks, abilities, histories, and the way the world looked. You could even effect the time flow during the fight which created all kinds of twists for the game mechanics. If you were successful, you could find a way to return everyone to their timelines and their effect on history then created a very special ending, and there were other sub-endings, 30 in all.	„

External links

• [1] Full Sega-16.com interview