SNK’s Royal Saudi Arabian Owner Aims To Have ‘The King Of Fighters’ Developer Retain Its Japanese Identity: “I Want It To Once Again Be As Bright And Soaring Around The World As It Was In The 1990s”
Spencer Baculi
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According to current company owner Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, rather than attempting to change the core culture of The King Of Fighters series developer SNK to appease foreign audiences, he believes the key to the company’s future success is keeping it true to its original Japanese identity.
The opinion of His Royal Highness, who took 100% share ownership of the developer after it was purchased in 2022 by his non-profit MiSK Foundation, was first divulged to the public courtesy of SNK’s current CEO, Kenji Matsubara.
Amidst a presentation regarding SNK’s current operations given during the recent 2024 Games Creator Conference, Matsubara recalled (as machine translated by DeepL) a conversation he had with Sir bin Salman regarding his plans for the company’s future.
According to the CEO, when pressed as to whether he would like to “move SNK to Saudi Arabia and make it bigger” or “develop more and more games using SNK’s IP in the US and Europe?”, the Crown Prince reportedly asserted in turn, “I want SNK to grow as a Japanese company. I want it to once again be as bright and soaring around the world as it was in the 1990s.”
To this end, as per a recap of the panel provided by Japanese video game development news outlet Game Makers, Sir bin Salman added that he intended to do everything he could to help the company achieve this goal.
Notably, this approach to letting SNK ‘keep on keeping on’ is not a new one for Sir bin Salman.
Asked by US video game news outlet Video Game Chronicle following their acquisition by the MiSK Foundation as to how much future influence the Crown Prince and his Saudi Arabian background would have on the company’s operations, current The King of Fighters series producer Yasuyuki Oda explained, “For us, we’re just focusing on making games. We’re not a political company or anything like that, so it doesn’t affect us in any way,”
“It has no – no – effect on our creative output,” he detailed. “We have full freedom on what we want to create.”
Further denying that their identity would be altered due to their new ownership, Oda added, “One thing we would say is that our ownership are generally fans of the IP, and they have been forever, so it’s up to us what we want to do as far as creating content goes.”
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