Thea Realm Fighters

Thea Realm Fighters
Promotional flyer of the game
Developer(s)	High Voltage Software
Publisher(s)	Atari
Platform(s)	Atari Jaguar
Release	Q3 1995 (Unreleased)
Genre(s)	Fighting
Mode(s)	Single Player, Multi Player

Thea Realm Fighters is a unreleased fighting game that was being developed by High Voltage Software for the Atari Jaguar, scheduled for a October 1995 release by Atari. This fighting game was one of the many Mortal Kombat-rip offs developed in response to the series' popularity during the 90's. Although the game was never released, various prototypes of the game has been showed in several Jaguar-related festivals and expos such as JagFest and EJagFest through the 2000s for the people to play and images, videos and ROMs of the several builds known to exist have been posted online. The game was also planned to be released for the Atari Jaguar CD before the game's cancellation.

Thea Realm Fighters was a 2D fighting game developed on the heels of the popularity of the first Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II. Like some other examples of games built to compete against Mortal Kombat (most notably Tattoo Assassins), it was cancelled before it was released. The shrinking market for the Atari Jaguar was one of the potential contributions to this decision, according to one of the developers who worked on the game. The game was close to completion and according to the same developer who worked on the game, it was 90% complete. The game featured digitized grahpics and characters, with some of them portrayed by martial artists known from the Mortal Kombat games. The plot itself was strikingly similar to Mortal Kombat II with the final boss of the game, SurRaider, attempting to conquer the Earth and adding it to his vast empire.

The game was going to feature more than 25 characters, each one with 4 special moves and 2 finisher moves, four different gameplay modes with over 30 stages. After defeating 12 characters in the single player mode, the player was going to face SurRaider, a powerful warrior from another dimension. The game was unveiled during the January 1995 Consumer Electronics Show and in E3 1995. It was scheduled for release in the third quarter of 1995, the game was reported to be unpolished and too early to judge, with spectacular backgrounds and lackluster character animation. Only four characters were available at that time, with only one featuring special moves.