Shaq Fu/Development

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Development

Delphine first began development of what would eventually become Shaq Fu as a basketball game, but after talks with American athlete and endorser Shaquille O'Neal (a self-proclaimed fan of Mortal Kombat), the title soon evolved into a competitive fighting game starring the titular celebrity. Acknowledging that they could not directly compete with the worldwide sensation that was Street Fighter II, the company instead produced a game that highlighted the developer's greatest strength: rotoscoped animation.

Shaq Fu utilizes the same rotoscoping techniques from the company's previous cinematic platform game Flashback, in which an actor is filmed against a bluescreen and then digitized with an advanced SGI workstation. Delphine's artists would then touch up the final results using some of the roughly 7,000 original character sketches as a base for defining the game's character animation. Filming was directed by an expert in kung-fu martial arts, with a number of Shaq Fu's characters being rotoscoped by stuntpeople from the movie industry.

In addition to starring in and endorsing Shaq Fu, O'Neal also personally assisted with finishing some of the game's dialog. In the end, roughly 40 people worked on the project in total.

Timelines

Timeline (Mega Drive)
07 08 09 10 1994-06-23: Summer CES 1994 1994-10-28: US release, DE release, UK release

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Timeline (Game Gear)
History not known (yet).