Canceled Fighter Rising Thunder Will Live on Through Public Source Code Release

Radiant Entertainment’s fighting videogame Rising Thunder had a mission: create a fighter accessible to many, lacking the crazy and complicated button combinations needed for combos and whatnot. After League of Legends developer Riot Games bought Radiant in 2016, Rising Thunder died a quiet death. But the game will live on, as Rising Thunder producer, former Capcom community manager and Street Fighter IV commentator Seth Killian revealed in a Reddit post that the final build and source code of the game will be released to the community.

Rising Thunder: Community Edition will leave it up to fighting game fans to further evolve the gameplay. The game, which features simplified controls relative to those of other fighting games, can be played with a keyboard or a controller. Killian touts the big features of the release:

*Final game build: We’ve tinkered with the old final build of the game, adding offline, local play (!!!) along with some quality of life improvements. Local play will support keyboard vs. controller only, but it should be straightforward to hack in 1p controller support through external scripting. Just to be clear, this release is basically the same one you had in your hands when we turned off the servers in 2016. Please don’t expect new characters, systems, etc.

*Source code for an open-source version of the Rising Thunder server, so you can play matchmade games online. The original RT server is somewhat of a beast, segmented into a bunch of different services that aren’t particularly easy to deploy or maintain. So instead we’ve whipped up a first pass at a bare-bones server that will allow you to play online with rudimentary matchmaking and limited features. And we’re making it open source so that if you’re inclined you can tinker and improve it.

This free edition of the game is just what fans of the shuttered videogame have been asking for, and the team even teases that they have “moved on to develop something new and we’ll share that with you when the time is right.”

Rising Thunder will rise from the ashes via the Community Edition sometime in January 2018.