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Relevo, the independent developer behind the long-awaited Neo Geo-inspired "future sports" game Bullfighter: Neon, has revealed it has enlisted the help of the former SNK pixel artist J.Mikami.
Bullfighter: Neon is a game we've covered on the site before and has already been in development for several years at the point of writing.
Developed for Steam, it originally hit its Kickstarter goal all the way back in 2022 and was initially scheduled to release in Q4 2023, but it has taken considerably longer than planned (and still doesn't have an official release date), with the team having had to prioritise other projects in the past to raise extra funds to ensure the project lives up to expectations.
Designed as a tribute to Neo Geo "future Cyber-Sport” arcade games like Super Baseball 2020, Windjammers, Soccer Brawl, and Power Spikes II, it takes the rarely-explored (inside of video games anyway) contest of bullfighting and "adds robots, lasers, and sunglasses to create a wacky spin on it," having players pick from six characters to battle mechanical creatures called CyberBeasts, each with their own distinctive attack patterns and arena-based hazards.
All of this is rendered in a fairly nostalgic pixel art aesthetic, calling to mind '90s arcade games, with that arguably being the area where J.Mikami will inevitably come in handy, having worked at SNK from 1991-1995, on games like Mutation Nation, Super Sidekicks, and Samurai Shodown.
According to Relevo, "from the first moment [Mikami] learned about the project, he was very excited and eager to collaborate on it," and so, the team, therefore, decided to bring him on board in the hopes of increasing "the overall quality of the game visuals while keeping them as faithful as possible to the look and feel of the early Neo Geo games." They've described it as an "honour" to work alongside the SNK artist, and have encouraged their backers to follow him on Twitter/X to welcome him "into the bullring"
As Mikami states, he has primarily been helping with "some character images" on the project and hopes that, when it finally releases, enough people will support it so that a proper Neo Geo version might one day see the light of day.