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I'll never forget the first time I saw the original Fatal Fury in the flesh. My dad used to own a chain of video rental stores, and one of them had a bunch of arcade cabinets installed, presumably to keep kids busy while their parents picked out a movie. These were a mixture of standard cabs and Neo Geo MVS-equipped ones, and the latter gave me my first taste of SNK's coin-op pedigree.
I became so obsessed with the game that I snapped up Takara's ultimately disappointing SNES port when it launched in Japan, but even that couldn't dull my adoration for the pugilistic exploits of Terry and company – how could SNK possibly top this? Turns out the answer was pretty simple, really; the sequel was even better.
I will admit to slightly losing touch with the series after Fatal Fury 2 (and its successor, Fatal Fury Special), which is why Bitmap Books' Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsu: The Ultimate History is such a refreshing read.
Like the company's books on King of Fighters and Metal Slug, it charts the full history of the series (right the way up to the descent but controversial City of Wolves) and features official art, concept drawings and loads of lovely bespoke screenshots.
It also contains brand-new interviews with key personnel on this series, including Hitoshi Okamoto, Youichiro Soeda, Nobuyuki Kuroki, Takeshi Kimura, and SNK's Chief Producer of fighting games, Yasuyuki Oda.
Sadly, series creator Takashi Nishiyama wasn't interviewed for this particular book, but it does cite a prior interview with him that perfectly sums up the importance of the Fatal Fury series in the world of fighting games:
"I was headhunted by SNK after [Street Fighter's] release, and many members of the development team and I moved over. So we went on to make Fatal Fury, and we put in a lot of the things we couldn't in Street Fighter. So for me, Fatal Fury is my 'Street Fighter I'. And the actual Street Fighter I was created by someone else at Capcom after I left. So that's where the vision for Street Fighter diverged; the continuation of Street Fighter that I had in mind with Fatal Fury, and the Street Fighter I! that Capcom created."
It often feels like Fatal Fury gets a little overlooked, even within SNK's pantheon of titles – during the 1990s, it was overshadowed by the astonishing success of King of Fighters, a series which ironically features many Fatal Fury characters.
Bitmap Books has already given King of Fighters its chance to shine, so this new book is the perfect companion piece to that story; a franchise whose evolution and development ran parallel to its stablemate, but always felt different.
