Sango Guardian Chaos Generation (”Sango Guardian” being a localisation of 三国演武, read sānguó yǎnwǔ or sangoku enbu) is one of my favourite poverty fighting games of all time. It is at once shockingly competent and shockingly amateurish – its explosive, deeply silly gameplay feels fantastic to control; it also is at least 50% stolen assets by volume, with hitsparks from Street Fighter IV and animation skeletons from Street Fighter X Tekken, and every single fighting game mechanic under the sun, from Focus Attacks to aerial Magic Series chains to The King of Fighters XIII’s MAX Mode to Vampire Savior’s hop dashes as a universal mechanic but only if you press down three times. The PC version of the game takes six minutes to boot up on an SSD, all of its resolution settings are fake and the developers responded to requests for online features by looking at Fightcade. In all ways, it is a complete mess and I love it dearly.
Chaos Generation was developed as an arcade title by a Chinese company called Guangzhou Sealy Electronic Technology, whose bread and butter these days consists of large-scale VR attractions and their own spin on BEMANI’S DanceRush Stardom as well as a veritable army of ticket and prize games. By all metrics, Chaos Generation was one of, if not the only Actual Video Game the company made that wasn’t some kind of full-body novelty experience (DRS clone included). It got a Steam release back in 2017 and received a couple of updates that adjusted character balance and added QOL features like allowing local versus play from the main menu and fixing a training mode game crash caused by taking the dummy’s HP to 0 (god bless), but while it’s still available for purchase, the developer’s Steam account went inactive around the end of 2017, and the game has been all but abandoned otherwise.
Early in 2018, I sent an email to what was then the US branch of the Sealy game development division asking about the status of Chaos Generation. I got this response:
So on top of development being completely over, that division of the company seemingly no longer exists, as far as I can tell, and all the people responsible for its operation are probably no longer with the company.
Further, looking through the company’s website and related catalogues reveals that all mentions of Chaos Generation have been completely scrubbed. The company wants basically nothing to do with it. I recently emailed the company directly asking about the status of the game (and specifically whether they would be interested in releasing development files), but received no response.
It would seem that the only leads on this project are the name of the director, one Huang Wen Quan, the hanzi for which I don’t know, and two people who were apparently involved in the game’s debugging and general QA process:
That’s right. Da Kou and fucking Xiao Hai, two of the strongest King of Fighters players in Asia, apparently did QA for this dinky little game.
My only other potential leads are names associated with the company on LinkedIn (ugh), otherwise I’m kind of at a dead end here. I really want to figure out what’s going on with this game, though, because my ultimate goal (lofty as it may be) is, as stated previously, to obtain the game’s development files so that its port can be remade from scratch by the community. I will learn game development to do this, I promise.
A very strange update
Addendum 2024.09.02
In the 10 months that intervened between when I wrote the above post and now, I emailed both Sealy and Xiao Hai. Neither responded. And yet, things have moved on their own anyway.
I was notified by a friend over on Bluesky that Sango Guardian Chaos Generation had received an update on Steam. And not just a run-of-the-mill manifest ID update like what seems to happen to dead games constantly, but actual substantial updates to the game’s files. There were three updates in total from 1 September 2024: an update that added this new image, titled freewallpaper.png, to the game’s 00readme folder; an update that made some as-yet unknown changes to the game’s data.bin and scharactors.bin files (which are, as far as I know, compressed bundles of data pertaining to general game assets and character data, respectively); and an update which removed the game’s levels.bin file, which contained all of the game’s stage data, and replaced it with individual directories for each and every stage in the game.
The significance of this beyond the fact that Sealy is apparently doing literally anything with Chaos Generation is beyond me. They’ve effectively decompressed all of the stage data, which technically leaves it open to potential user-end modification. The question is whether or not this file decompression will extend to characters, as well - doing so will obviously give end users access to character models and the like to some degree, but a different pipe dream emerges from this possibility as well: the above image (which has existed since the game released, for the record) contains designs for a number of characters that don’t appear in the game proper, including Mr Definitely Not Geese Howard up the front, there.
These characters were all “intended” to be added to the game as playable characters back when the game had active development staff working on it. It’s unclear as to whether or not this means anything, though: anyone who followed the development of this game back during the Steam Greenlight days might rightly be suspicious that these characters were “intended” to be playable in much the same way as the developers “intended” to add rollback netplay to the game, despite the fact that it released with zero networking functionality whatsoever.
So… I don’t know what any of this means. There have been no patch notes, no dev communication otherwise (privately or publicly), and nothing has actually changed about how the game works. I still don’t know who Huang Wen Quan is, and I’m not sure I ever will. But at least we can replace the textures on the game’s stages now. Hell, the training mode stage might actually be playable for the first time ever!