The Art of SNK WORLD Vol.1 / SNK Illustrations - A Quick Look

A couple of weeks ago i went around to Jericho MPM's house to play some games, so he could show me a few things on older SNK titles, and he also kindly offered to show me some of his SNK artbook collection.

Of the ones i looked through i found The Art of SNK World Vol.1 and SNK Illustrations to be the most interesting, so will be showing a few photos i took of those two books.

Although there is not much to say about each book, as they are pretty much 90% images, i did take quite a few photos. 

First up is The Art of SNK World.

As you can see in the contents listing it covers artwork from SamSho 1/2, Fatal Fury 1/2/SP, Art of Fighting 1/2, and KOF94.

Each section of the book is seperated by a title page with a blurb of Engrish at the bottom, which of course SNK is pretty infamous for.

Secondly is the SNK Illustrations book, of the two books i really liked this one in particular. Not only does it cover a wide range of SNK games, it also covers SNK games from before the MVS/AES era.

Apologies for some of the sideway images, blogspot sometimes uploads them that way even after i turn them the right way around...

As you can see the KOF96 section has profiles for each of the teams of that particular game, as well as below where you can see a character relationship chart. For example Kensou loves Athena but there's no arrow pointing back to say she likes him in the same way...lol.

Some of the 4koma (4 panel comic strips) in this are pretty good, i've always liked the 4koma KOF stuff but never owned very much of it. :(

Found the above image pretty amusing...I believe it was artwork used for the instruction manual for one of the KOF games (most likely 95).

As mentioned there's a section dedicated to the older SNK games. (Ikari Warriors, Athena, etc...)

The Athena designs section i particularly liked, especially since i had never seen any of it before.

Interestingly G-Mantle appears in this book, had not known of this character before the recent Neo Geo Station promotions so was nice to see some more information/pictures of him. The above image some of you should recognise from the backgrounds of the Neo Geo Station releases.

There was also a page showing the illustration process, although not in great detail (this double spread was all that was shown) it was nice to see how they worked on the art at SNK.

So overall alot of images in each of the books, though as i mentioned of the two i really liked the SNK Illustrations book in particular due to the diversity of images. Hopefully will own it myself at some point.

Finally just to end this fairly long entry, there was one last thing that i found kind of interesting in one of the Neo Geo Freaks that Jericho owned.

In this particular issue of NGF it shows what looks like an early version of SNK vs Capcom, although as i understand this would have been the Capcom version which eventually ended up as Capcom vs SNK.

As you can see in these early screenshots the game included stages from existing Capcom fighters as well as one stage which i don't seem to recognise at all.

I'll try to do a write up on Neo Geo Freaks at some point, i don't own many issues (maybe about 6 or 7 of them) but they are pretty interesting and well recommended for SNK fans if you can find them.