the original tetsuo “homage” was complete enough that eolith (the korean company that hired a bunch of snk staff and produced kof 2001 & 2002, during that brief window where snk didn’t exist and its former properties were up for grabs) hired tetsuo’s va to voice the character.
then in 2002 they introduced yet another playable kyo clone, simply named “kusanagi,” and they hired kaneda’s va to do his lines.
the inside joke behind all of this being that originally, late into the development of kof’94, kyo was going to be highly based on kaneda—so they decided that, for whatever reason, k9999 hated the shit out of this specific kyo clone in order to make even more layered akira references.
… now in kofxv, when krohnen faces kyo he gets all pissy, saying “i know you’re not the same guy, but i can’t help but punch that face you’re wearing.”
which is yet another tee-hee reference to krohnen’s past, iykyk rite lol.
Well, not quite. The Team K9999 Krohnen ending in KOF XV actually has Ángel casually referring to him using his old name, so All-Star isn’t exactly shattering all expectations by using the name. It’s still somewhat surprising to see them be so casual about it, because it’s much less funny this way.
to make the situation even odder and more opaque, someone working on the modern kofs said fairly recently that actually there had never been a legal problem around k9999; that in fact otomo himself had given them his blessing. it seems that redacting k9999 from everything was more of an inside joke that a few people kept perpetuating because it entertained them to see the growing fan obsession around the mystery, and they thought making the character a sort of cryptid gave him a sort of intrigue.
which. as an explanation is way more confusing and full of holes, right. like, where to start with that.
but it does taste a bit like the sort of arbitrary in-jokes we used to see a lot of when japanese studios still had that internal dev culture.
Yeah, that’s why I was confused as to what the joke was! Because the K9999 situation has been out in the open for a bit now, haha.
I know way back when Krohnen was announced, SNK’s community manager was saying that he had perpetuating the idea of legal troubles around K9999 for a while so they could surprise people like that, though I know the rumors of legal stuff go back much further.
