Welcome to the Karate Supers webpage! Karate Supers is a label that I've coined (and as far as I know, literally no one else in the whole world has adopted) to refer to the sub genre of fighting games that are two dimensional, anime-style superheroes, bright and polite, weaponless martial arts video games. A fair number of games can be pinned into this genre, in part because in the early and mid 1990s there were so many clones and rip-offs of the most popular ones. But for my purposes, I'm talking about games like those that belong in the Street Fighter series, the Fatal Fury series, the King of Fighters series, and the Darkstalkers series. In fact, I'm talking specifically and explicitly about those titles, and really only those titles. Although I reserve the right to cameo characters from other games as well, including possibly obscure ones like the Breakers, Art of Fighting, Double Dragon, or Fighter's History series. Just for fun, on occasion.
The explicit purpose of this site is merely to archive my fan fiction efforts with regards to those video game series. I have no plans to get graphically fancy, and this index will only be heavily edited, reworded and made a bit more polished after a considerable amount of more content is available. So here we are.
- Prelude: Return of the King
- Against the Wall
- Interlude: Enemy of the State
NOTE: This story was started a number of years ago, and has progressed very slowly as my interests have often wandered into other endeavors. While the Fatal Fury and Street Fighter series seem to be well and finished up by now, King of Fighters is not. This story makes references to characters and situations that exist in the current King of Fighters story line knowing that--at the time of this writing--that story line is not complete. Be that as it may, I'm unlikely to go back and rework large portions of the story to accommodate new characters and plots as subsequent games (King of Fighters XII?) are released because 1) it's too much work for questionable pay-off, and 2) this is an adaptation of the story lines and characters, not a faithful reproduction of them. A faithful reproduction of any of the story lines from the various game series would not easily lend itself to combining characters from all of them, and since that's the whole point, I'm not going to jeopardize my ability to combine characters just to get story details "right."
NOTE 2 (August 2008): No sooner do I call the genre finished when it lurches back to life. Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is in Beta testing right now, and Street Fighter IV is in Japanese arcades as I type. King of Fighters XII is underway, and will use all new hardware and all new graphics (finally retiring "ancient" sprites.) There's been a lot of repackaging and releasing going on too; all of the Fatal Fury games (except Mark of the Wolves) have just been released as PS2 collections, and even the fan favorite King of Fighters '98 is being updated and released for the PS2 as King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match with a number of new characters and stages added.
I'm still not sure what all this activity means, but presumably it means that the genre has some life in it yet and my earlier statement that I'm not terribly concerned with having my story go obsolete through new releases may well have been premature after all.
NOTE 3 (May 2011): Well, my story and site here has sat with very little change for literally several years now. Bummer. After a number of tweaks, it appears that the Street Fighter IV series is complete, and there is no word at all on whether or not there will be a "Street Fighter V" or not. The Vs. series has been kicked back to life, and the Ash story line was concluded in King of Fighters XIII. Because I don't have a current generation game system, I don't have any SFIV titles yet, and KOF13 isn't available here anyway (although if I had Xbox Live, I could download the KOF2002 Unlimited game. That would be cool.)
In any case, the release of those titles doesn't really change any of my plans here anyway--as I said before, I'm writing an adaptation of various Karate Supers related stories. Like the many superhero movies that have been hitting theaters the last several years, my adaptation is struggling to find a balance between updating and modernizing vs. keeping faithful to the details of the original. In my case, I'm specifically trying to keep faithful more to the spirit of the games than to the details, many of which, after having so many titles released, are not consistent anymore anyway. But I will incorporate cool ideas when I can... and frankly, a lot of the ideas of Street Fighter IV and King of Fighters XIII are cool, and compatible with my story to boot. I don't want to get stuck in a situation where I'm chasing an ever changing target, but since they're already compatible and add more cool details, I don't think that's where I am right now.
NOTE 4 (June 2014): Migrating my website to the blog. Needless to say, the content is somewhat out of date. This is not meant to be seen as any kind of promise that I'll be moving more quickly any time soon, merely as an indication that I'm interested in making sure that it doesn't crash, so that it's still available sometime if I ever do get moving.
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