The game that never happened.
Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 11:31 pm
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.
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.
Source: http://segaretro.org/Eternal_Champions: ... al_Chapter
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.
Source: http://segaretro.org/Eternal_Champions: ... al_Chapter