Mr. Matsumoto wanted The Art of Fighting (AoF) to be more cinematic, to look and feel like an action movie. To be more visceral than any game before it. Like Street Smart and Fatal Fury there was a mix of the traditional martial arts master and the street fighter as playable characters. The fictional Kyokugenryu Karate style was placed on both Robert Garcia and Ryo Sakazaki. The two were evolved from the Ken and Ryu template respectively. This new game was really pushing the power of the Neo Geo console. It featured more color, more detail and sprites bigger than the competition’s. Not to mention that it had graphics that zoomed in and out of the action. These sprites could also reveal damage. Characters bruised and their clothing tore from round to round. There was even a slight RPG element as characters could grow and evolve thanks to the lessons learned in the bonus stages. The genius of this game came in the planning stages. If SNK wanted to dethrone Capcom as the best fighting game developer then they had to offer the best experience. Although Fatal Fury and the Art of Fighting looked and played differently they were part of the same shared universe. This meant that at some point there would be a crossover game featuring a massive library of established characters.
The entire cinematic feel of AoF was not lost on audiences. The figures in the game had more realistic proportions and looked less cartoonish than their rivals. It was much easier to get pulled into this world as bits and pieces of the story were revealed in between every stage. Yuri Sakazaki, the young sister of Ryo had been kidnapped. It was up to Ryo and Robert to find and save her. Every person that the duo faced had been hired or bribed by Mr. Big, a South Town mob boss. Each encounter brought them one step closer to the truth. At the end of the journey Ryo found out that the kidnapper was a martial arts master known as Mr. Karate. At the climax of the game Yuri stopped her brother from killing Mr. Karate. She cried out that man was their father. This was an exceptional plot twist and something that set up a sequel. It turned out that both Mr. Big and Mr. Karate answered to Geese Howard. Now that Yuri was safe there would be a reckoning between the Sakazaki family and Howard. Imagine how confident Geese must have been in his abilities by also starting a war with the Bogard brothers at around the same time. Story points aside the AoF game is one of the perfect examples of the SNK school of design. I’ll begin with one of the best masters hidden in plain sight.
A while back I talked about how the traditional Muay Thai master ended up in fighting games. I called Chompoo the first notable female Muay Thai master in a fighting game. This angered a lot of SNK fans because the character King predated her by more than 20 years. In context I was talking about actual Thai fighters that dressed in the traditional fighting uniforms. Chompoo had the shorts, taped up hands and feet and even headdress. I was not talking about characters that knew Thai boxing. With that said let’s actually look at the elements that went into making King and why she had a fantastic design. First off she wore a suit, close to that of a bartender in a high class restaurant. She had the familiar stance, hands up for striking and moving on the balls of her feet. If you had asked any other designer to create a female Muay Thai master you probably would have ended up with someone that looked more like the character by Saeed Jalabi. Saeed hit all of the traditional notes perfectly. The shorts, headdress and even wrapped cords of older, classical forms of the Thai boxing arts. Any audience member could look at the design and know instantly this was some sort of fighter. Even if the gamer was not familiar with the fighting arts they could still tell a few things about her. The athletic frame, toned muscles, wrapped hands and feet were meant for striking. This was not a ceremonial costume but one for competition.
By contrast look at the design that Toshiaki Mori came up with. The SNK designer would become one of the most influential artists of all time. Most people would recognize him by his pen name, Shinkiro. He didn’t approach his designs the way one would have expected. What made his work so great was how down-to-Earth every figure was. When he was helping create the costumes for the AoF cast he knew to make each character fit the story. As Robert and Ryo made their way through South Town the people they fought reflected a certain part of the city. The thugs looked like biker gang members, those in the military wore fatigues. Having a half-naked Muay Thai fighter in a classy restaurant would not have made any sense. But what about one dressed like a bartender? The uniform was central to the character. Modern martial arts movies featured characters that wore deceptive clothing. One the first examples was the tuxedo that Robert Baker wore when he fought Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury (1972). Bruce Lee helped bring classic wuxia or Chinese hero stories into the modern era. The same thing was true of the suit that Benny Urquidez wore when he fought Jackie Chan in Wheels on Meals (1984).
The suit was deceptive but that was only one layer of Shinkiro’s design. King looked like an effeminate man, or perhaps a boy. Audiences had been conditioned to expect 99% of the people they fought to be men. Up until that point Fan from Yie Ar Kung-Fu was the only female opponent in a fighting game and Chun-Li from Street Fighter II was the only playable female character. Audiences expected a female martial artists to be wearing a traditional dress. That whole idea was turned upside down if players tore the blouse off of King with a special attack. That was when it was revealed that she was wearing a bra underneath. That violent act made the game feel far more mature than any other title. This sort of turn was something that you would expect in a movie and certainly not in a game. SNK hid the reveal right until the end, going so far as to name the character King instead of Queen. In doing so it made the design very memorable. This master of the fighting arts was hiding in plain sight. She would be the perfect example as to what set SNK apart from the competition.
If you have been reading my blogs for a while then you know that I like to dig into the influences behind the various characters. For King the most obvious comparison would be with the martial arts star Cynthia Rothrock. Since 1985 Cynthia had been featured in a string of movies, mostly produced overseas. Women hadn’t really been considered for leading roles in most Western-produced martial arts films. There have been exceptions of course in other action films such as the Black Widow from the Avengers films, Furiosa from Mad Max or Gazelle from the Kingsmen. Those characters were almost always in a supporting role and not the stars of the film. In Hong Kong however women could be the stars of the film. This was a tradition going back to 1928. Heroes came in all shapes (see the chubby Sammo Hung), sizes, and colors even. When Cynthia couldn’t land a role in a US film she was almost always guaranteed to find a spot in Hong Kong. The same thing was true for Ron Van Clief. As a black martial artist, and Army veteran he faced tremendous racism in the USA but was a welcome star in Hong Kong cinema.
Cynthia’s trademark short haircut, lightning fast kicks and array of martial arts moves made her a stand out star. She had been actively involved in martial arts for a long time and was trained in different schools, including Tang Soo Do, Tae Kwon Do, Eagle Claw, Wu Shu, and both Southern and Northern Shaolin. She was able to hold her own against many men and women artists from Hong Kong, some of which learned fighting and acrobatics from the Chinese Opera, just like Jackie Chan. Cynthia often played a street smart cop, nicknamed China O’Brien in one of her more famous recurring roles. She was such a formidable figure that I would argue she not only influenced the design behind King but also Blue Mary, who turned up in the Fatal Fury series. This made Cynthia one of the rare real world figures that inspired the creation of more than one character, in more than one game series.
Cynthia was not shy about using her good looks in the roles she played. When the part called for it she would show some skin, tastefully of course. The people working at SNK were keenly aware of how the actress sexed up some of her parts or modeling shoots. Shinkiro did not outright try to make King a voluptuous, overly sexualized character. It would have destroyed any surprise waiting for audiences when they first saw her. It was the other artists working at the studio that started putting her in form-fitting suits, they turned her vest into a bustier and starting pushing her breasts out further and further. She would not longer appear androgynous following the AoF. Blue Mary had always been presented as the more sexualized of the designs. She was top heavy with an exposed midriff, wearing uniforms that were not standard law-enforcement. A very skimpy white top and denim bottom was created as an alternate costume for her in King of Fighters (KOF): Maximum Impact 2 Regulation A. This costume was inspired by an outfit worn by Rothrock in a modeling shoot. However we should confuse the two. The design behind King and her planning extended far into the lore or the SNK universe.
On the surface King was a very simple design. She had the skills and grace of a top bartender but with the power of a no-nonsense bouncer. On top of everything she was not going to remain as a bit player in South Town. The figures in the SNK universe had room to grow and the did in the various KOF sequels. The Sakazaki family opened Kyokygenryu schools, with Ryo entering tournaments to help spread its name. Andy and Terry Bogard travelled the globe following the trail of Geese Howard and making new allies along the way. King made fast friends with the other leading females in the KOF series. She partnered with the ninja Mai Shiranui and Kyokugenryu prodigy Yuri Sakazaki to form an all-women team. This was a first in fighting game history. She also partnered with them to open a club in a later timeline. King had taken her experience, including learning from Capoeira master Richard Meyer and his infamous Pao Pao Cafe, and applied it to her own business. She was ambitious and was destined to be a major player in South Town, yet unlike Geese Howard she was going to do this without resorting to extortion. King was an exceptional character design and easily one of the greatest fighting game characters ever created, female or otherwise. Artists and developers try to break into the genre should learn from SNK and see how they were able to hide these martial artists in plain site. The studio was able to hide masters in many ways. We will explore the ways they were able to do this in the next blog. As always if you enjoyed this blog and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!
Cynthia Rothrock also inspired Sonya Blade or so I hear.
ReplyDeleteC'mon man. Everyone knows Blue Mary was based on Android 18.
ReplyDeleteLet's say it was a mash up between 18 and miss Rothrock. Snk loved to mix up feats of several characters to create its fighters. Take World Heroes Shura. It is a mix between real life Nai Kanom Tom and Joe Higashi.
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