Personal History of Karate Supers, part 2

http://sfkofff.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-history-of-karate-supers-part.html

The link above takes you to Part I. For this part, we talk about my personal history with the genre after the release of Street Fighter II. This is, of course, everyone's Golden Age of karate supers, because this is when they were huge. Not only were Street Fighter II cabs literally everywhere, but all kinds of would-be imitators were also popping up all over the place. Some of those games weren't actually bad… it was just obvious that they were imitators, so they didn't get the attention they may have otherwise enjoyed. In America, at least, the same seemed to be true of the SNK games. While I did play around with the original Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special, Art of Fighting, and the earliest King of Fighters titles, it was just playing around, really. For that matter, I also played around with World Heroes, which was terrible, and Data East's Fighter's History, which is probably most notorious today for being the subject of a lawsuit by Capcom U.S.A of Data East U.S.A. for copyright infringement. The lawsuit was eventually scrapped, as the courts ruled that the similarities were "scènes à faire" and therefore not subject to copyright protection. (Also, the sequel to that game which used licensed Neo*Geo hardware called Karnov's Revenge, wasn't a bad alternative to Street Fighter II, really. Certainly a lot better than World Heroes, if not quite up to par with the Fatal Fury games. Of course, by the time it came out, we were on Super Street Fighter II Turbo was already out, and Street Figher II had kinda run its course. Capcom was gearing up to release the first Alpha title. So, Karnov's Revenge was too little too late. Too bad when Data East went out of business their property rights didn't revert to SNK like ADK's did. I'd much rather see these guys get modernized than the World Heroes characters we got in Neo Geo Battle Coliseum. Oh, well. The bosses sucked, though. Truly terrible concepts. Gah.)

I played around with any title that looked vaguely Street Fighter esque, for that matter, and I'm sure that there are tons of games that I've played that I no longer have any reliable memory of whatsoever. By this time, I was in college, so most of my gaming money was spent at the arcade in the basement of the MSC; the student center at Texas A&M University. I also got a SNES system around this time, and of course, Street Fighter II. In fact, this was to be my main outlet for non-arcade action for quite some time, and I even went so far as to pick up Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the SNES because it looked unlikely I'd get a Playstation for years (which is, in fact, what happened---I didn't get one for years.)

In addition to the Street Fighter and Street Fighter like games, I played a lot of Mortal Kombat during this era, and Mortal Kombat II. Mortal Kombat III was a disappointment to me, and at the end of the day, I ended up thinking that the whole concept around Mortal Kombat was just the novelty value of the other-the-top violence. My interest in the series waned and never really peaked again. I also became a big fan of the 3-D fighters when they first came out: Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Soul Edge, etc. all got a lot of play in my arcade. Maybe part of the reason those didn't become quite as popular to me personally was because I didn't have a system that could really play them for a long time. I own a fair number of 3-D fighters now… but I tend not to care about them as much as I do my 2-d karate supers games. I think, also, that part of the reason for that love is that it's where I started.

Another part of it, though, is that this was about the time that the Internet was becoming mainstream, and I got involved in Street Fighter discussion on Usenet, I discovered Street Fighter fanfic (this was in the early, heady days of fanfic, where the concept still seemed exciting. Later over-exposure would sour me a bit on the idea… but as I'll mention later, it's still something that I see the potential in. Even if the reality is so often banal); in short, my exposure to Street Fighter stuff was all over the place, which I think further cemented my love for it, and my unwillingness to really "move on" even when the rest of the video gaming world mostly did.

In those days, I was all about Capcom. I saw SNK's efforts as merely the most notable of the many Street Fighter clones. I had a hard time with the finicky and difficult controls that some of the earliest SNK games had. Also, their localization efforts were laughable; their translations into English were nonsensical and ridiculous. Be that as it may, I did always see Fatal Fury Special as the nearest thing to a competitor that Street Fighter II ever really faced. Only later did I come to realize that in Japanese arcades, that was quite literally true, and that Fatal Fury Special was the most popular game in 1993 over there. I did notice that a lot of the same people who liked Street Fighter seemed to like SNK games, though. So I kept playing them off an on as I saw them. I played more Samurai Shodown than Fatal Fury, or King of Fighters, but I continued to find the concepts behind these SNK games intriguing, I continued to hear about their characters, and I even saw crossover fanfics that featured characters from both companies duking it out together.

About this time, I stumbled across Bethany Cox's fanfics. I mentioned them before; they are, still, amongst the best fanfics of any kind I've ever read, and in the mid 90s, I read a lot of them. I ended up becoming online pals with a guy named Ken Meredith, who was also writing a fanfic; a retelling, really, of the Street Fighter Animated Movie. I thought to myself, "hey, I could do this!" and so I did. I put together a massive fanfic, hosted on Geocites up until Geocities went belly-up recently. I archived it by copying and pasting the text off of the webpages into a Microsoft Word and saving it as an rft. It ended up being 105 pages long, so not a novel by any means, but still pretty ambitious for a fanfic. Probably too ambitious; rereading it many years after writing it, I think parts of it still work quite well, but it's hampered by lack of focus (too many point of view characters coming and going) and the strange desire I developed to cameo as many people as I could, even the Street Fighter EX specific characters and Darkstalkers characters, who I didn't actually really know very well because I only played those games a handful of times.

And that gets us to about 2002 or so. I was still playing Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha 2 and occasionally Fatal Fury Special on the SNES, and otherwise only vaguely aware of the rest of the genre through the Internet. I'd briefly had a flare-up of interest in fanfiction, but too many author insertion and other bizarre fantasy fictions (not to mention the prevalance of so many, many terrible, terrible writers) soured me on the effort. While I still acknowledged the potential for fanfics to be cool, so few of them were. This state of only semi-awareness continued until I finally was able to get a Playstation. Ironically I didn't even buy it; some friends of ours who were moving were selling it in a garage sale. When my wife mentioned that I was interested in buying it, they just gave it to us. They were only asking $5 I think anyway. By this time the PS2 was already out. Yes, have I mentioned before that I'm really, really cheap most of the time, and that I also am a very late adopter of new technology?

Anyway, for part 3 I'll get us to the "modern era" of my personal history of karate supers.