The King of Fighters brawler series is SNK’s flagship franchise. Now there is a thick book from the publisher Bitmap Books that does justice to the big name.
The English book publisher Bitmap Books has published a whole range of high-quality print products in recent years: the bound tomes deal with consoles such as the Super Nintendo, Neo-Geo or Atari 2600, are sometimes devoted to a game series (Metal Slug), portray a software house such as Gremlin or concentrate on the Covers of classic video games. As you can see, Bitmap Books is all about retro. However, there is a catch: the books are only ever available in English. In our experience with several Bitmap Books works, however, these are usually easy to read, so that a decent knowledge of English is sufficient to enjoy the books.
However, this article is primarily about the new work, “The King of Fighters: The Ultimate History” – a weighty tome with 544 pages and dimensions of 210mm × 297mm. Of course we had a copy for review purposes. The book is divided into sections such as history of the series, game artwork, character artwork and interviews – and makes an excellent impression from the start. Without exaggeration: If you have a thing for the Klopp kings of SNK and don’t mind the English language, you can’t avoid this book!
Screenshot – Bitmap Books (Game Culture)
Screenshot – Bitmap Books (Game Culture)
Screenshot – Bitmap Books (Game Culture)
The authors Robert Jones and Christopher Rasa introduce you to the series with a lot of specialist and background knowledge, here you can really find out (and in detail) why, after successes with Fatal Fury and The Art of Fighting, among others, SNK came up with the idea of an all-star to send brawlers into the ring. On more than 200 pages, all parts of the series are dealt with one after the other – from KoF ’94 to part 15 – and illustrated with perfectly pixelated screenshots, large character portraits and animated sequences – in this way the graphic development of the series is wonderfully presented . I would have only wished for a few more widescreen screenshots of the stage backgrounds at this point.
In the “Character Art” and “Key Art” sections, I’m not only happy about the plenty of original artwork of the entire cast, but also find many sketches from the development and drawing board phase. There’s also plenty of cult-cheesy artwork in the most glorious ’90s style for which SNK fans have had to resort to older Japanese-language publications. And the interview part, which runs over almost 60 pages, is again a lot of text for the money: Casual fans would probably have preferred a few streamlined conversations with more punchlines, but these texts go into detail. In the more than ten-page interview with Masanori Kuwasashi, who is mainly responsible for KoF ’94 – ’96, I found out, for example, how the planned side-scroll banger Survivor became the cornerstone for the success story of King of Fighthers.
The standard version of The King of Fighters: The Ultimate History costs 35 British pounds plus 7 pounds shipping to Germany, converted to almost exactly 56 euros. Admittedly, that’s not a small amount of money, but it’s a really thick, high-quality book. The All-Star Edition costs around 23 euros more – it comes with a few art cards and comes in a pretty slipcase that surprises with squeezable character portraits and sound effects.
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