is playable in Story Mode. Characters have different ending sequences depending on which opponents were spared, or killed with a Death Combo during the Story Mode. Story On a battlefield a demon spirit enters the body of a dying mercenary. He is reborn and defeats twenty rulers in bloody combat. He goes on to found the reign of the Demonlord Raith. At the height of his power, his doom is foretold by a shaman:"When the night turns violent and the moon bleeds, gripped by the skeletal fingers of death...a child will rise to face the demon in combat...and the lord of demons will fall by the hand of...the WeaponLord."Against the advice of his lieutenants to kill the children born that night, the Demonlord waits to face his foretold killer in fair, one-on-one combat. Years later the Demon Zarak overthrows Raith and becomes the new Demonlord. 25 years after the prophecy was made, Zarak holds a great tournament of champion warriors. The winner will face the demon in a final battle. The Demonlord prepares to meet his destiny head on and to destroy the Weaponlord. Development The game's lead designers James Goddard and Dave Winstead had previously worked for Capcom. Goddard was co-designer and U.S. producer of Street Fighter II: Champion Edition and Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting and designed the character Dee Jay for Super Street Fighter II, and Winstead had worked on Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Both had extensive fighting game tournament experience and wanted to cater to dedicated fans of the genre with Weaponlord. They also wanted to optimize the game for the slow dial-up connections of the XBAND service, timing parry animations and character turnaround time to account for lag. To achieve the creative control they needed to create such a game, they left Capcom to join Namco. There they took over a project led by Ken Lobb codenamed "Melee", a four-player brawler, and redirected it into the one-on-one fighter they had in mind. The decision to make the game weapons-based stemmed from Goddard's fascination with Conan the Barbarian. The characters and their fighting poses were sketched by Alvin Cardona. Visual Concepts had an incredibly tight schedule to complete the game, and the decision to add a Genesis version came later into the development cycle than most other multi-platform titles. Steve Chiang, the game's co-designer and chief programmer of the SNES version, wrote an in-house tool