Fatal Fury / Garou Densetsu: The Ultimate History review

Bitmap Books excels in deep dives into retro gaming history and publishes some of the best game art books, and there are two ways to read a new release. The first is how you're supposed to read it: by starting at page one, taking in the introduction, working through the chapters and absorbing the history. The second is to immediately flick through the pages, pausing at the artwork, screenshots, and sketches until you realise you've accidentally spent half an hour staring at a sprite sheet.

That's exactly what happened when I opened this new release, the hefty, weighty Fatal Fury / Garou Densetsu: The Ultimate History. To be fair, Bitmap Books makes it very easy to get distracted. This is another beautifully produced hardback, a large, heavy thing that feels substantial the moment you pick it up, packed with glossy pages, oversized artwork and enough SNK history to keep fighting game fans occupied.

I particularly love the fold-out pixel art South Town map tucked into the opening pages. It's a little extra detail that immediately places you in the world of Fatal Fury before you've read a single paragraph and shows the publisher has room for fun.

• Buy Fatal Fury / Garou Densetsu: The Ultimate History at Bitmap Books.

Why words matter

Once I actually started reading, though, it became clear that the artwork isn't the main attraction, even though it’s a big draw and what lasts. The standout feature for me is the interview with Takashi Nishiyama, the creator of Street Fighter and Kung-Fu Master, who later went on to create Fatal Fury for SNK. Later, other SNK talent have a say, but Nishiyama is a draw and offers fascinating insights into how ideas evolve between projects, how game designers respond to new technology and changing player expectations, and how one game often becomes the starting point for the next. If you're interested in game design rather than simply gaming nostalgia, there's a lot to enjoy here.

That feeling runs throughout the book. Fatal Fury often gets discussed in the shadow of Street Fighter, but this retrospective does a great job of explaining why the series mattered, how many ideas it introduced or refined as it evolved, and, indeed, why Fatal Fury has just as much right to a fighting game legacy as Street Fighter. You get a sense of SNK constantly experimenting, trying new things, pushing hardware in different directions and looking for ways to stand apart from Capcom and do something new with each iteration.

The game-by-game coverage is comprehensive too. Every entry gets its moment, from the early NEOGEO arcade classics through to Garou: Mark of the Wolves and the recent City of the Wolves revival, which gets its own developer interview slot. I enjoyed reading about SNK's adoption of rotoscoping techniques as it chased ever-more fluid animation, as well as the discussions around the move into 3D with Wild Ambition. There's even room for Fatal Fury: First Contact on the NEOGEO Pocket Color, a game that's easy to overlook but absolutely deserves its place in the series history, and one I still dust off and play today.

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Visually, the archive material is fantastic. Concept sketches, promotional art, magazine imagery, development artwork and character designs mingle with full-page screens and are reproduced beautifully throughout. If you're buying this book primarily for the artwork, you won't be disappointed.

That said, I did come away wishing there was more space dedicated to the artists themselves. SNK has some of the most influential artists in fighting game history, including Eiji Shiroi, Shinkiro and TONKO, and while their work appears throughout the book, their voices largely don't. That's often the nature of Japanese development histories, where teams rather than individuals tend to take centre stage, but I'd happily read another hundred pages focused entirely on SNK's artists and their process; maybe that's volume two.

An essential deep dive

Either way, Fatal Fury / Garou Densetsu: The Ultimate History feels like another essential addition to Bitmap Books' growing library of gaming retrospectives. The artwork gets your attention immediately, the interviews keep you reading, and by the end you'll probably have a renewed appreciation for just how important Fatal Fury was to fighting games, SNK and arcade gaming as a whole.

If you're a Fatal Fury fan, it's an easy recommendation, and you’ve probably already got it on order, but if you're interested in how fighting games evolved during the 1990s, it's worth picking up even if Terry Bogard has never been your main.