Sega has had a recent surge of attempting to bring back games from their list of classic titles. In a recent interview with VGC, global head of transmedia, Justin Scarpone, casually announced that Sega is working on a new Virtua Fighter game when talking about franchises in development.
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. Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Shinobi, and we have another Virtua Fighter being developed. And so all that’s very exciting.
When further asked about why Sega has procrastinated on opening the vault of Sega classics to be brought back, Scarpone stated:
I don’t have a great answer, I only have my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that Sega is well-loved as a brand and as a company precisely because it’s not always succeeded. It’s had its ups and downs over the decades, and I think there was a period, particularly post-hardware Sega, where they were much more about just focusing on improving the quality of their games, getting distribution as widely as possible, and they were a true 100% game developer and publisher business.
Virtua Fighter’s last release was Virtua Fighter 5 which was released in 2006 and received another edition titled Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown which released in Arcade and the PlayStation 4 in 2021. Outside of attempts at making a mobile version of the game in both 2011 and 2014, the Virtua Fighter franchise hasn’t received much attention since its last big release in 2006. No other details on the development of the classic fighting game were given by Scarpone in the interview, but hopes are high that Sega can stick the landing with their attempt in reviving Virtua Fighter in a market that has seen Capcom, Bandai, and NetherRealm all do so with their recent fighting game releases.