Long-time readers of the site might recall several stories that we ran regarding the development of a new arcade fighter by the name of Dark Presence. The first of these ran in March 2008, with subsequent posts filling in additional details on gameplay and graphics. The last time it was mentioned was in 2012 but news had been quiet on the title until yesterday.
In case you don’t want to go clicking through old posts, Dark Presence has been in development by Galloping Ghost Productions, the development wing of the famous Galloping Ghost Arcade out of Brookfield, IL. Designed to be like a modern Mortal Kombat, this game uses digitized characters but in a way that goes beyond what 99% of 2D fighting games attempt. Each actor was filmed doing their movesets from both sides (no sprite-flipping) and performing these sets with every single opponent. This was done to make the fights appear as realistic as possible but it means that thousands of frames are used for each character. This is one reason that the game has taken so long to reach it’s current state, with the actor filming taking five years to complete. This also means that a console port might be unlikely as the game would have to ship with a hard drive; just the demo shown on Monday used over 20GB of data and that was just for two characters, not including levels. As I recall, they were expecting the game to take up over 1TB of space, which is a little crazy for any game to have but it is one advantage that arcades get to have over their disk using console cousins (and no one really wants to download a 1TB digital game).
An early render of Treton’s stage in Dark Presence (click for full view)
Galloping Ghost held broadcast on Facebook this past Monday from their “Dark Presence Day.” Total it was 2 hours in length, showing a number of updates and some gameplay.
From what you’ve seen so far, what do you think about it?
