Shaq Fu

Shaq Fu is a 2D fighting game developed by Delphine Software International'  published by EA' for the Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis & SNES on October 28, 1994. It features former professional basketball player Shaquille "Shaq" O'Neal as the main protagonist.

In the game's storyline, Shaquille O'Neal walks into a dojo while heading to a charity basketball game in Tokyo, Japan. After speaking with Leotsu, a martial arts master, Shaq goes to another dimension, the Second World, where he must rescue a young boy named Nezu from the mummy, Lord Sett-Ra.

Development
While initially pitched as a basketball game, Shaq Fu became a fighting game after talks with Shaq, who is a self-proclaimed fan of Mortal Kombat; Delphine acknowledged that they could not compete directly with Street Fighter II from a technical perspective, instead building a game that highlighted the team's strengths at computer animations. The same rotoscoping techniques were used in their 1992 title Flashback: The Quest for Identity, where actors would be filmed against a blue screen, the frames would be digitized with the help of a Silicon Graphics SGI workstation, and artists would touch up the results using some of the roughly 7000 original character sketches as a base for defining characters. Shaq portrays himself in the game, though many sequences were directed by a Kung Fu expert; other characters were filmed by movie stuntmen and women, and O'Neal also assisted with some of the dialogue. Roughly 40 people worked on the project in total.

To promote the game's launch, Shaq released his second studio rap album, Shaq Fu: Da Return, which peaked at #67 in the US' Billboard 200 chart and #19 in Billboard's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart; those who pre-ordered or purchased the console versions of the game in its initial launch also had gotten a Promotional CD featuring the track "Stand and Deliver".

Differences
The SNES has 7 playable characters: Shaq, Naomi, Beast, Sett-Ra, Mephis, Voodoo & Rajah

The Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis has all characters from the SNES version intact, but with the addition of Diesel, Auroch, Colonel, Leotsu and Nezu, & the Lab, Wasteland, and Yasko Mines stages.