Dark Rift

About Dark Rift

Dark Rift (1997) is Kronos Digital's 3D fighter, the first Nintendo 64 game to run at 60 frames per second, pitting fighters from three dimensions against each other for pieces of a Master Key.

Dark Rift in Depth

Set far in the future after Criticom, it spans three dimensions: the Neutral Dimension, home to Earth, the Dark Dimension of demons, and the Light Dimension of energy beings, who despite the name show no angelic qualities. The crystal sought in Criticom turns out to be the Core Prime Element of a Master Key holding the power to all the universe's secrets. Found long ago lodged in a spatial tear, the key burst into three pieces when retrieved, flinging two into other dimensions and widening the tear into the Dark Rift.

Players choose from eight fighters, with two hidden characters unlocked by finishing single-player mode, and fights default to three rounds out of five rather than the usual two out of three. Unlike Criticom, every animation was motion-captured, directed by Ted Warnock, whose background was traditional animation. Its graphics and animation were widely praised, with Electronic Gaming Monthly's Shawn Smith comparing them to Virtua Fighter 3, and IGN and Next Generation admired character designs such as Demonica and Morphix. But EGM's reviewers felt it was weak in every other respect, IGN and EGM found projectiles too slow to be useful, and Edge called it an average fighter that "fails to produce a single surprise".

Making Dark Rift

Kronos Digital Entertainment, founded by Stan Liu, developed it and Vic Tokai published it for the Nintendo 64 and Windows in 1997. Liu said Kronos "got stuck doing fighting games for a while simply because we were one of the very few U.S. game developers that actually made a fighting game". Reviews were mixed, but many saw it as a big improvement on Criticom: IGN's Doug Perry said Kronos had "overcome its Criticom syndrome" and called it, for the time being, "the best fighter on Nintendo 64", while GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann said only its graphic effects saved it from falling below average.