Eternal Champions - Promotion and Merchandise

Promotion and Merchandise

A Slurpee flavor entitled "Sega Eternal Champions Cherry" was once available in 7-11 stores throughout the United States. It came in cups with pictures of the characters on them, and the bottom of the cup contained a temporary tattoo. There was also a special cash++ rebate promotion in July 1993 that was featured in the MTV.

Two gamebooks based on the game, "The Cyber Warriors" and "Citadel of Chaos" were released by Puffin Books. In them, the reader controls the newest Champion and travels through time helping the game characters battle a megalomaniacal artificial intelligence called the Overlord, who is bent on replacing them with duplicates so that they can not change the course of history for the better. It was also given a Sticker Album in 1993 by Panini.

Eternal Champions was adapted by the UK Sega Magazine Sonic the Comic in a stand-alone magazine Eternal Champions Special, which introduced the main characters and served as an adaptation to the game. The characters also appeared in two stories in the main Sonic the Comic series, first in Eternal Champions (issues 19-24) and then Larcen's Revenge (issues 37-40) which dealt with Larcen Tyler returning to 1920s Chicago and working with Shadow Yamoto to take down the crime boss who killed him. Eternal Champions was the only non-Sonic-related Sega property to receive a special issue of Sonic the Comic.

The rap act Bone Thugs-N-Harmony have sampled music from this game for the instrumentals of several of their songs. The songs "Eternal" and "Crossroad" (not to be confused with their song, "Tha Crossroads") are the most notable cases of using Eternal Champions for their beats. However, Bone does not mention Sega in the album credits for using their copyrighted music. The cartoon show "Courage the Cowardly Dog" also employed some of the same audio loops (probably included with the same software) as bases for creepy background music.

Electronic Gaming Monthly sponsored Eternal Champions tournaments in different cities throughout the United States as part of a roaming video game show. The game, however, was not yet completed so the participants were only given the choice of four characters to play as: Shadow, R.A.X, Larcen and Slash. The winner of the finals would receive a copy of the game (when it was finished), a leather lettermans jacket with an embroidered Eternal Champions logo on it, and a resin plaque with the Bushido symbol (used in the game's logo) on it.

Eternal Champions (cartridge) was the second "packaged game" to be included with the Sega Activator, an elaborate infrared ring controller that players stood in and punched and kicked in order to make the characters perform different combat movements. It was one of only a few games that actually recognized the Activator and took advantage of most of the features of the unit. The player using the Activator was given an advantage of receiving 50% less and inflicting 50% more damage than the player using a regular controller.