Longtime fans of the Dead or Alive series may remember that Dead or Alive 1 originally had a fighter in it’s original prototype, Kelly, which mysteriously disappeared upon the game being officially launched in Japanese arcades back in 1996.

A fan asked Dead or Alive creator and former director Tomonobu Itagaki on his personal Facebook if he knew what exactly happened to Kelly (shown above, wearing the red headband). Itagaki-san obliged, and even gave an explanation as to how the characters names had changed from prototype to official release.

Itagaki responded on Facebook, saying that while Kelly was in the prototype on the Sega Model 2 arcade hardware, he was later scrapped and replaced by Zach:

Kelly was the first character we developed. It was first experience for us (original members of Team NINJA), so the completion rate of Kelly’s was low. So I had to decide to reject Kelly.Anyway. Certainly, the almost characters’ name has changed. I’ll write those here. code name -> Name in product.

Kasumi –> Kasumi

Loo -> Jann Lee

Lei Fang -> Lei Fang

Tina –> Tina

Karasu -> Kamui -> Ryu Hayabusa

Gatsby –> Bayman

Hong Dee –> Genfu

Fang Fu –> Raidou

*depends on my memory

You will easily find that there’re only seven characters. We strongly believed that Fighting games have to provide at least eight characters. But the rest time we had was too short. So, I and Ehara (lead designer) decided. “Let’s develop Kelly again from the scratch”

That was reason why Zack was born.

Tomonobu Itagaki is currently working on his latest creation – Devil’s Third, which is on track for a release some time later this year, exclusively on Wii U.