Killer Instinct Gold - On this day

In the mid-1990s, the martial arts genre was driven crazy by the transition to a three-dimensional environment. Titles like Virtua Fighter and Tekken spearheaded that transition, but some still stuck to traditional 2D performances. Among them was Rare's series Killer Instinct, which gained its fame quite late, in 1995 on the Super Nintendo console. A year later, a sequel for arcade machines followed, and it was based on it that the Killer Instinct Gold for Nintendo 64 was created and launched to this day.

Killer Instinct Gold was what we call a 2.5D sheet today - a game in which the gameplay was two-dimensional and the backgrounds in 3D. The game continued to rely on its main trump card, and these were crazy combo moves and combo breakers. The specificity of the Killer Instinct was also in the commentator who energetically exclaimed what was happening during the battle.

Killer Instinct Gold brought a total of 11 fighters to play with. Compared to the previous game, Thunder, Riptor Eyedol, and Cinder were missing, and new characters such as Maya, Tusk, Kim Wu, and Gargos appeared instead. They fought in different locations, from the jungle to space, and the news was that the camera followed the action and approached the fighters when they were close.

Killer Instinct Gold was supposed to be one of the first games for the Nintendo 64, but it was launched after the console itself. The Rare development team suffered a bit with the game port on Nintendo's cassette format, but in parallel, they even worked on a version of the game for the then already old Nintendo. That version was reportedly completed, but never saw the light of day.

Killer Instinct Gold sold weaker than the first Killer Instinct for SNES but remained remembered as one of the best tabs on the Nintendo 64 console. It was also Killer Instinct's last appearance on the console as Rare later became owned by Microsoft. The series then slept for the next 17 years before returning in a free-to-play game format.

Since 2015, Killer Instinct Gold can also be played on Xbox One consoles as part of the Rare Replay collection.