The player who depletes the opponent's health bar wins the bout, and a player does not recover health upon draining their opponent's first health bar.
A port of the original game is included with the 2013 game under the title Killer Instinct Classic. Also featured in the game are "combo breakers", special defensive moves that can interrupt combos.Ī critical and commercial success, Killer Instinct was followed by a sequel, the 1996 arcade game Killer Instinct 2, later ported to the Nintendo 64 as Killer Instinct Gold, as well as a 2013 revival of the franchise as a launch title for Xbox One. The game also introduced "auto-doubles", a feature which allows players to press a certain sequence of buttons to make characters automatically perform combos on opponents. The player that depletes the other player's life bars first wins the match. Instead of fighting enemies in best-of-three-rounds bouts, each player has two life bars. ĭespite a generic storyline, Killer Instinct featured more detailed graphics and more diverse characters than other games of its genre as well as some gameplay elements unique to fighting games of the time.
Aspects of Killer Instinct's core gameplay were influenced from SNK fighting games, namely both the World Heroes series and the Fatal Fury series. The story was adapted in a limited comic book series published under the short-lived Acclaim Comics imprint.Īccording to Ken Lobb, the groundwork for Killer Instinct started as a Namco fighting game project in the early planning stages titled "Melee" (which itself later became Weaponlord) during his time at Namco. The game's plot involves an all-powerful corporation organizing a fighting tournament. It was released as an arcade game in the fall of 1994 and, the following year, ported to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and the Game Boy. Killer Instinct is a fighting video game developed by Rare and published by Midway.