Michael Latham

SEGA of America Producer and Designer Michael Latham, best known for Eternal Champions, passes away

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SEGA of America’s Michael Lathan has passed away, as reported by SEGA-16’s twitter account. Michael started his gaming character at Rainbird Software where he would localize computer games for the American market, he would then move to Mediagenic where he was a producer for Ghostbusters II and Tongue of the Fatman before the company went bankrupt in 1991.

“It was simply the most fun of any job I ever had. Everything just exploded, and for a young guy in the business it allowed me to do so much so fast. I entered the company as a producer, quickly moved up to run my own production group, and even became a VP before the age of 30, thanks to the unbelievable growth and talented people I worked with. It’s so hard to have all the right people in the right places, and when you do, you get hit companies and products. We were on movie sets, meeting with sport teams, going backstage at concerts – all kinds of exciting projects – and the development teams were still small and you really knew everyone you worked with unlike the mega development teams of today’s games.” – Michael Latham talks working at SEGA during the early 90s

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Eternal Champions spiritual successor gets named, first test renders shown

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adam-starcaster-highresscreenshot00203Remember SEGA’s 1993 fighting game Eternal Champions? The title was highly marketed by SEGA America as an ultra violent fighting game that was highly influenced by Mortal Kombat. It seems that Eternal Champions’ original producer Michael Latham has been working on a new fighting game which is set to be the spiritual successor to Eternal Champions and its being called “Eternal Successors“. Have to say, its a pretty damn good name.

Michael Latham said he was trying to get the official rights from SEGA, which they haven’t done anything with since the 1994 release of Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side on SEGA CD (1996 if you count loose spin-off title X-Perts). Michael also shared some test renders of what the game would look like running on Unreal Engine 4. If you want to give Michael Latham some feedback on Eternal Successors, check out his shoryuken forum thread here. He says that they are trying to do justice to the original SEGA Genesis color pallet with the renders and they have done a good job, I think. Not sold on the paint like filter, but the color scheme is pretty great.

More information for those that never got to play Eternal Champions,  the character with the yellow helmet is Trident from the first game, the other character is hard to tell since they have been ‘overtkill’ which is basically a fatality in Eternal Champions. Seeing as it looks like a female wearing high heels, I will have to guess its Shadow Yamoto. The stage that is being rendered is also known as ‘Trident’s Stage’, you can check the original stage here and compare it with the renders.

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