Rising Thunder returns — to be delivered into the hands of its own fanbase!

With Radiant Entertainment acquired by Riot Games in 2016, FGC community-driven concept fighter Rising Thunder had officially shut down, and was left to an uncertain future — if any. However, Rising Thunder was far from abandoned, and the game’s future has now indeed become clear!

Announced today on the Rising Thunder subreddit, Rising Thunder is returning to the community in a big way. Dubbed Rising Thunder: Community Edition, the team plans to polish up the title and open up its code for the fans to run with going forward. From the reddit announcement:

Hey folks. Super inspired by your efforts to bring back the game. We’d like to pitch in with a little help.

So here’s what we’re doing, all coming this January. We’re calling it “Rising Thunder: Community Edition.” Our intent here is to give the game back to you guys, the community, and let you run with it.

– 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.

All of this is free, and will stay that way forever. In the meantime, our team has moved on to develop something new and we’ll share that with you when the time is right. Until then, Happy Holidays from the Rising Thunder team!

Stay locked on to Shoryuken and the Rising Thunder subreddit for more updates, and keep an eye out for Rising Thunder‘s return in January, 2018!

Source: Rising Thunder (reddit)