It was about 2 months ago that SNK made an upload on their X and YouTube accounts of a very short animation featuring very recognizable Art of Fighting iconography.
The video showed the mask of Mr. Karate, Art of Fighting’s boss character, which was typically worn by Takuma Sakazaki, the father of main protagonist Ryo Sakazaki and his sister Yuri Sakazaki and also showed the iconic coin flip action from series deuteragonist Robert Garcia.
This animation was also captioned with “fans know what this means” but then, nothing more ever surfaced for it, not even at the SNK World Championship Finals which was just a few weeks later.
Now, though, there’s suddenly new interest drawn towards the post as SNK Producer Yasuyuki Oda posted on X quoting the animation from two months ago with some words you wouldn’t expect from an SNK Producer.
What on earth is this? https://t.co/orcjMxCL0P
— Yasuyuki Oda 小田泰之 (@snk_oda) December 18, 2025
While this is obviously some kind of joke (Oda definitely knows what it is and why it’s posted), it feels like a very deliberate post to bring attention to it again.
So what does it mean exactly? Well, the most obvious read is that it’s relating to the upcoming Art of Fighting game which SNK confirmed that they were working on as far back as two years ago.
Given that it’s been in some level of development for at least two years, unveiling the project soon wouldn’t be out of the question, especially if you look back at when other SNK projects were first shown.
The first trailer for King of Fighters 15 came out in December 2020 and was about one and a half years after their previous big project, Samurai Shodown, had released. At the time, Samurai Shodown was still being supported with DLC as well.
As for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, our first gameplay glimpse for it came at Evo 2023 in August of that year, also around one and a half years after King of Fighters 15’s release date. Similarly, King of Fighters 15 was still receiving DLC at the time.
Now, obviously, we haven’t gone one and a half years since Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves’ release date yet (it came out in April of this year, so about eight months ago), but given how far in advance they told us about Art of Fighting coupled with the likelihood that it may not be quite as high profile a project as their larger franchises King of Fighters and Fatal Fury were, it might be the perfect time to show it off.
It’s still a bit of a headscratcher that they unveiled this teaser so shortly before SNK World Championship and then had nothing to show for it, but in game development plans can change all the time.
The fact that Oda is now bringing it back to the forefront likely means something and hopefully we’ll find out more soon.