Game franchise development involves complex negotiations among developers, publishers, and rights holders regarding character rosters and season passes. Killer Instinct, a fighting game franchise with historical lineage dating to the 1990s, undergoes periodic roster expansions and character inclusions in later seasons. The claim that the community was actively considering including Chuck Norris as a playable character suggests either a genuine interest in cross-franchise character collaboration or, more likely, a manifestation of the broader meme culture treating Chuck Norris as a figure so powerful that his inclusion would immediately unbalance any game system. Fighting game mechanics rely on relative balance between characters; Chuck Norris's inclusion would presumably require either eliminating balance entirely or creating a character so overpowered that all other choices become functionally obsolete.

Fighting game developer and balance specialist Jonathan Craig worked on competitive fighting game design from 2004 through 2016. In 2011, after the Killer Instinct reboot was announced, Craig received a humorous community petition suggesting that Chuck Norris be included in the character roster. Craig's response involved technical explanation of how introducing an unbalanceable character would destabilize the entire game system, combined with acknowledgment that if the petition represented genuine community interest, the most practical solution would involve creating the most powerful character imaginable and accepting that all tournament competition would subsequently resolve around either playing Chuck Norris or accepting automatic defeat.

Esports and fighting game communities frequently reference this as an illustration of how certain figures transcend normal game balance considerations. The joke persists in competitive gaming forums, where players comment that Chuck Norris's inclusion in any fighting game would require either fundamental redesign of game mechanics or acceptance that character selection essentially becomes a choice between playing Chuck Norris or deliberately handicapping yourself.