A by-product of stress is often nostalgia, which I won’t lie and say I’m somehow above falling into that trap. The last several years have been nothing but collective stress on a lot of people and lately I’ve been feeling it too. A result of that has been remembering my childhood and some of the things I enjoyed, namely old video games. Specifically, those old weird fighting games Capcom made during the 1990s with the Street Fighter series being the primary ones. It just so happened to be my luck recently that Nintendo put some of the collections with those games on sale for a pretty price. And you know what I did?...
Illustration by Kinu Nishimuru (© Capcom)
Yeah, I got the bundle and started playing them once they finished downloading. What I recalled while playing them was that:
I’ve always been terrible with fighting games, never being able to get the right motor control to pull of any of the special moves and just mashing buttons hoping I can survive a given match;
Many of these games – which I had never played before except for Street Fighter II and Darkstalkers - were not what I expected when preteen me was flipping through old GamePro and EGM issues;
Some of these games are actually really weird (Red Earth and Cyberbots come to mind); and
The art definitely hit those nostalgia endorphins that made me want to play the games in the first place and is just as unique as I remember from those magazines I read as a kid.
Since I’m riding the high of those endorphins from these games, button-mashing madness notwithstanding, I went and ran a search on who exactly was behind the iconic art style behind these games. It appears there are several major illustrators involved:
Akira Yasuda (aka Akiman)
Character art for the original Street Fighter II by Akira Yasuda (© Capcom)
Yasuda worked for Capcom as a character designer from 1985 to 2003, when he left to work as a freelancer. He also seems to be kind of one of the the "originators" (the other is Bengus. as mentioned below) of how these games and their characters look, since he was the primary designer for the first Street Fighter II game. Also did mechanical designs for several anime and worked on Red Dead Revolver, the predecessor to Red Dead Redemption. (I've included a couple interviews translated by Shmuplations to give more context - they're interesting reads in themselves.)
Naoto Kuroshima (aka Bengus)
Illustration for Marvel Vs. Capcom by Bengus (© Capcom/Marvel Entertainment)
For most fans, Bengus is the big-timer and the one that really defined the Capcom house style for their fighting games. This is especially since he's the one who was in charge of the overall work for not only the original Street Fighter game in 1987 but also the Darkstalkers, Marvel Vs. Capcom, and Street Fighter Alpha series. When I think about 90s video games, it's his artwork that comes to mind first. A number of American comic book artists also cribbed from his style during the 1990s and early 2000s (especially Joe Madureira and Humberto Ramos).
Kinu Nishimura
.Illustration by Kinu Nishimuru (© Capcom)
Nishimura is the artist whose art I have the fondest memories of, since they're usually so playful! Her actual name isn't recorded online as "Kinu Nishimura" is an alias but if you've ever played any of the Capcom fighters from the late 1990s and 2000s (she went freelance in 2008), you'll recognize her work. She also served as a character designer on a whole lot of other games and anime.
Shinya Edaki (aka Edayan)
Street Fighter Alpha 2 illustration by Edayan (© Capcom)
Edayan is related to the Street Fighter series through his promotional works but is the primary character designer for the 3D Rival Schools series (which is kind of a spin-off). He would go on to be the main character designer for one of Capcom's biggest non-fighting game series: the Ace Attorney series.
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While looking this all up, I also stumbled across some other articles that were related but not always directly connected to these artists that I wanted to highlight:
The website The Fighters Generation has an extensive collection of art by all four of these artists as well as contemporaries from other companies like SNK.
One was a blog post written in 2020 by illustrator Matt Bucemi that is a deep-dive explanation how video game companies designed their promotional flyers in the 1990s ("New Arts of Armageddon: Visual Philosophies of ’90s Arcade Flyers").
Another was finding out that the iconic SNES and Sega Genesis box covers for Street Fighter II were done by a well-regarded airbrush artist named Mick McGinty, who passed away in 2021.
Also also - apparently Capcom posts their rejected art models online for Street Fighter V through Activity Reports, which are fun to look at if you're curious about what could've been, even if it's a more recent game.
See! The treasure trove of interesting things you can find when digging around!
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