Capcom may have shown off Teppen's early prototype as an April Fool's Day 'joke' over a year before the game was officially revealed
GungHo's mobile card game Teppen became instantly popular among fans of older Capcom titles including many in the fighting game community though we may have seen a hint at the project long before anyone actually knew what it was.
Back in 2018, Capcom did as it tends to do by releasing an elaborate April Fool's Day prank with a digital card game they called Hado Stone — an obvious play on Blizzard's popular Hearthstone title.
Taking a closer look at that joke game, however, reveals that it looks a hell of a lot like what Teppen would eventually become except very rough around the edges.
Hado Stone was based specifically around Street Fighter 5's characters while re-using many of the fighting game's assets for the card designs including portraits and various attacks.
What's more interesting though is the structure of statistics on these Hado cards. Aside from the diamond cost, they look basically nothing like Hearthstone's designs.
Anyone who has played Teppen can probably recognize the green arrows on these dummy cards as looking nearly identical to the mobile game's red attack value arrows.
Below that, we also have what looks to be similar to how characters' life points became represented in Teppen with the shield — though the stats in Hado Stone may have been swapped around.
Hado Stone even included its own exclusive pieces of artwork including the likes of sexy dakimakura Ed. Brand new and original art of older Capcom series like Darkstalkers is one of the biggest initial draws of Teppen considering how much effort was put into them to make an enticing product.
Unfortunately, Capcom has since pulled down Hado Stone from its website, so we can no longer go back and dig into more of its similarities though it was obviously fairly simplistic in its approach.
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We can see that the web-based game also separated character cards by classes like power, speed and tricky with color designations: something that Teppen also uses in a very similar manner — and even the same colors except for white.
There's a good chance we'll never know for certain if Hado Stone and Teppen are truly related, but their similarities are way too close together to ignore. If they do share blood though, it would certainly be interesting to learn whether the April Fool's prank was indeed a prototype or if it perhaps inspired Capcom to really look into the possibility of making their own mobile game.
Teppen is currently available to download on Apple iOS and Android devices, and we actually recommend checking it out for all of the excellent artwork and references to titles like Mega Man X on top of being a fun card game.
