Last year at The Game Awards, Sega announced new entries in multiple franchises within their backlog, including Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, and Streets Of Rage. Today, one of the company’s executives confirmed that another classic Sega franchise will be punching its way back into the limelight, as a new Virtua Fighter has been confirmed to be in active development.
Speaking with VGC, Justin Scarpone–executive VP and head of Sega’s Global Transmedia Group–confirmed the existence of a new Virtua Fighter alongside the other legacy Sega franchises mentioned previously. No other details on the upcoming project, or whether it will be part of a larger transmedia strategy–like Shinobi, another legacy IP, which has a game in development and a movie in production–were confirmed.
“So we have a suite of titles in development right now that fall into that legacy bucket, which we announced last year at The Game Awards,” Scarpone said. “Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Shinobi, and we have another Virtua Fighter being developed. And so all that’s very exciting.”
Assuming the new game is not a reboot or remake, the new Virtua Fighter would be the sixth entry in the fighting franchise, which ushered in a new era of 3D-based fighters when it debuted in 1993. The most recent game, Virtua Fighter 5, first launched for home consoles in 2007 before being remastered in 2021.
Sega’s transmedia strategy began with the successful release of the Sonic The Hedgehog movie in 2020–with the third film in that series set for release next month. Other recent Sega releases include the Yakuza: Like A Dragon series on Amazon Prime Video, Sonic X Shadow Generations on consoles and PC, and Metaphor: ReFantazio from the Atlus wing of the company.