The VC Advantage: The men who would be Kings

When The King of Fighters '94 introduced the concept of the three-person team to side-scrolling fighting games, it simultaneously introduced the idea of the joke team. While the other teams consisted of martial arts champions, mercenaries, and wielders of ancient powers, the American Sports Team was a group of three American professional athletes:

• Brian Battler, the football player in a single, giant shoulder pad, obsessed with tackling

• Lucky Glauber, a pro basketball player who spends his spare time street fighting

• Heavy D!, whose rendition of "Now That We Found Love" was a hit in 1991

All three of these characters use their sporting skills in combat. That's no problem for Heavy D!, a boxer, but it means that Lucky basically throws basketballs at people (though, to be fair, sometimes the basketball is on fire).

It took a bending of reality to bring these guys back after KOF '94. As the story goes, they were invited to the '95, '97, and 2000 tournaments, but other characters beat them up and stole their invitations every time. Not even those jerks on the New Face Team could stop the American Sports Team from appearing in King of Fighters '98, because KOF '98 is a non-canonical "Dream Match" in which characters from across the series are selectable just for the sake of a fun game.

The VC Advantage is a weekly look at the secrets inside games -- not just cheat codes, but assorted trivia and oddities. We aim to bring back the feeling of the hint columns from game magazines, except when we do something else.