Capcom Art-book

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Sep 192008

Capcom art has a special place in the collective heart of Of Rice and Zen Magazine. We can’t review this art-book dispassionately and we’re fine with that. We hope you are too.

The Of Rice and Zen staff fondly remember summer holidays when frollicking in fields, camping and catching bugs was something children in movies could do. We on the other hand had a London Borough, a corner shop and a chippy (fish and chip shop to non-Poms). The best thing about the corner shop was the Bubble Bobble arcade game. That was until Street Fighter 2 came along and kick-started a new era of gaming.
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It was deep, strategic and and had more buttons than any other game at the time. It was like high-speed chess. These things are all well and good, but when you’re a kid what you’re really attracted by is the dazzle. The bright lights, the technicolour. The striking anime design. Before the world went 3D it wasn’t the polygon count that caught the eye, it was the character design. And the artist was key.
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In the 8 bit days we went by the packaging to know what the character in the game was supposed to look like. A large scooping of imagination meant that the blocky pixels on screen really did look like the beast/hero/animal in question. We were bringing to the text.
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Shortly after this Capcom came along and helped to change this. After Ghouls and Ghosts ruled the arcade world for a while, arcade games went bold and big budget with Final Fight. By the time Street Fighter 2 became a worldwide phenomenon, spawning manga, anime, a Hollywood movie and spin-off games galore, the characters had become household names.
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There was nary a kid in town who didn’t know what these characters looked like and which one was their favourite. The distinctive artwork behind the game not only boosted its popularity, but also made its transition into a myriad of other media a natural step.

To a lover of animation, illustration of video games who grew up in the 80s, this book is essentially the illustrated bible. Waves of nostalgia are accompanied by a warm glow of admiration for the imagination and artistry on display in an age where games were only just bursting out of their shell into new worlds of visual spendor. In this magnificent book the child of the 80s has a period of his life collected and pinned down on the page like a butterfly collection for posterity, to be passed down to children who don’t remember when such things weren’t constructed by man from microchips and polygons.
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For the Of Rice and Zen team its a necessary purchase. Even if you have to buy a new coffee table to cope with your growing collection of books to show friends, this Capcom art-book cannot be recommended highly enough.
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