The VC Advantage: The men who would be Kings

by JC Fletcher { Jul 23rd 2008 at 10:00PM }

When The King of Fighters '94 introduced the concept of the three-person team to side-scrolling fighting games, it simultaneously introduced the idea of the joke team. While the other teams consisted of martial arts champions, mercenaries, and wielders of ancient powers, the American Sports Team was a group of three American professional athletes:

Brian Battler, the football player in a single, giant shoulder pad, obsessed with tackling
Lucky Glauber, a pro basketball player who spends his spare time street fighting
Heavy D!, whose rendition of "Now That We Found Love" was a hit in 1991

All three of these characters use their sporting skills in combat. That's no problem for Heavy D!, a boxer, but it means that Lucky basically throws basketballs at people (though, to be fair, sometimes the basketball is on fire).

It took a bending of reality to bring these guys back after KOF '94. As the story goes, they were invited to the '95, '97, and 2000 tournaments, but other characters beat them up and stole their invitations every time. Not even those jerks on the New Face Team could stop the American Sports Team from appearing in King of Fighters '98, because KOF '98 is a non-canonical "Dream Match" in which characters from across the series are selectable just for the sake of a fun game.

The VC Advantage is a weekly look at the secrets inside games -- not just cheat codes, but assorted trivia and oddities. We aim to bring back the feeling of the hint columns from game magazines, except when we do something else.

Tags: american-sports-team, fighting, snk, the-king-of-fighters

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

moo @ Jul 24th 2008 1:14PM

Lucky had ridiculous range on his low strong kicks in KOF98, and Heavy D! had a pretty solid moveset along w/ a double-hitting jumping strong punch.
the football player .. he not so good.

Rodrigo @ Jul 24th 2008 3:27PM

i hated this dudes in KOF98 but then i chose iori, kyo and yashiro and they were history. this guys are pretty hard and pretty awesome too, specially lucky. the best KOF games are KOF 97-00.

Almadi @ Jul 25th 2008 8:06AM

Brian was my 'Humilator'. The character I choose to beat people while me and my opponent would laugh hysterically cuz he was cheap but sounds so lame.
I miss the glory days of KOF, used to spend 3-4 hours on one token (my record was 87 wins in a row).

Maybe I can play you online one day JC. And I might just use Brian.

intro94 @ Oct 18th 2008 4:05AM

I loved how balanced this game was,I used Joe and i did magnificently against the hoards of Ioris, Kyos, Terrys ,Clarks and Mary`s at the arcades(and boy i did travel around and kept fighting in the american continent).