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Rising Thunder: Community Edition Belongs to the People in January

With Radiant Entertainment having moved on to Riot, the developer will release the final build of Rising Thunder to the public for free and for the fighting game community to do with as they please.

Ozzie Mejia

December 18, 2017 11:55 AM

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The story of Rising Thunder was supposed to be a grand one for PC owners. Back in 2015, Evolution Championship Series founders Tom and Tony Cannon and former Capcom community manager Seth Killian banded together to create Radiant Entertainment. Rising Thunder was going to be the studio's first project, a PC-exclusive fighting game that focused on simplicity. Then Radiant got picked up by Riot Games and Rising Thunder was thought to be shuttered forever. But on Monday morning, Rising Thunder rose from the grave.

Tom Cannon took to the Rising Thunder subreddit to reveal plans to release the PC-exclusive fighter to the masses as Rising Thunder: Community Edition. While the former developers will have no involvement in its development going forward, the idea is instead to allow the community to build the game for themselves and allow the scene to live under their terms.

Rising Thunder: Community Edition will collect the final build of the original game's alpha, while adding offline multiplayer, albeit with keyboard vs. controller only for the moment. Players can also pick up the source code for an open-source version of the Rising Thunder online servers, which will allow for online matchmaking. It's a simplified version of Rising Thunder's online mode, but the door is now open for the community to build it into something better themselves.

Rising Thunder: Community Edition is set to release in January, free of charge. As for the Cannons and Killian, their project for their new employers at Riot remains shrouded in mystery, though Tom Cannon notes "we'll share that with you when the time is right."

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?