This episode covers the work and influence of the Capcom Design Team- an in-house group of illustrators and designers responsible for producing artwork for seminal video games like Street Fighter II and Marvel vs Capcom.
Capcom, a Japan-based maker of successful game properties, made a tremendous impact on the business of video games world wide, and helped usher in the current boom in Japanese-based visual media like manga and anime as much as fellow cultural exports like Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Speed Racer, and the Dragon Ball series.
The art team behind the bulk of Capcom’s fighting game imagery began in the late 80s and lasted until the early 2000s. The team’s story includes an eccentric artist remembered almost as much for his habits as his skills and leadership, a draftsperson capable of taking stereotypes and rendering them with profound emotion, an up and coming artist possessed of an incredible work ethic and mammoth ability to produce images, and numerous other talented artisans all brought together to form the Capcom Design Team.
REFERENCES
Hendershot, S.. (2017). Undisputed street fighter: The art and innovation behind the game-changing series. Dynamite Entertainment
Dyer, S. (2022). The king of fighters: The ultimate history. Bitmap Books Ltd.
Lapetino, T. (2016). Art of Atari. Dynamite Entertainment
Leone, Matt (2020, July 7). Street fighter 1: An oral history. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/7/21270906/street-fighter-1-oral-history-takashi-nishiyama
Hayashi, M. K., & Moylan, M. (2009). SF20: The Art of Street Fighter. Udon Entertainment Corp.
Moore, G., & Hodgson, A. (2021). Street fighter memorial archive: Beyond the world. Udon Entertainment Corp.
Leone, Matt (2014, February 3). Street fighter 2: An oral history. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/a/street-fighter-2-oral-history/
Hayashi, M.K. (2019). Darkstalkers: Official Complete Works. Udon Entertainment Corp.
Leone, Matt (2021, April 14). X-Men: Children of the Atom: An oral history. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/2021/4/14/22336505/x-men-children-of-the-atom-an-oral-history
Ferriere, G. & Zubkavich, J. (2005). Street Fighter: Eternal Challenge. Udon Entertainment Corp.
Famitsu Book Editorial Department (2001). Capcom Design Works. Enterbrain, Inc.
Various (2020). UDON’s Art of Capcom . Udon Entertainment Corp.
Intro:
This is Incomplete Design History, a podcast that explores overlooked and ignored topics in graphic design history. It is our goal to deepen and expand the knowledge, understanding, and interpretation of design history.
Because history is messy. It’s incomplete.
Thank you for joining us today, I am your host, Sam Washburn.
As a young millennial, I’m part of the last cohort of kids and teenagers to haunt the American arcade scene of the late 1990s. At the time, one game stood head and shoulders above the rest: Marvel vs Capcom 2. This arcade fighting game featured a magnificent mix of characters from American comics and Japanese video games, from Spider-Man and Captain America to Mega Man and Ryu from the Street Fighter series. The game presented something new and exciting in a visual style that exploded from the arcade cabinets and home discs in a way that altered the traditional way of advertising games in the U.S. The company that produced this game, Capcom, made a tremendous impact on the business of video games world wide, and helped usher in the current boom in Japanese-based visual media like manga and anime as much as fellow cultural exports like Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Speed Racer, and the Dragon Ball series.
The art team behind Marvel vs Capcom 2, and the bulk of Capcom’s fighting game imagery, began in the late 80s and lasted until the early 2000s. The team’s story includes an eccentric artist remembered almost as much for his habits as his skills and leadership, a draftsperson capable of taking stereotypes and rendering them with profound emotion, an up and coming artist possessed of an incredible work ethic and mammoth ability to produce images, and numerous other talented artisans all brought together to form the Capcom Design Team.
Opening music
[Lead into episode’s content]
The World Before Street Fighter 2
To really get how transformative the Capcom Design Team was, it’s important to understand video game presentation and advertising in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s hard to imagine today, but this was a time when images and advertisements were much more regional and national than what we can experience today. The internet was in its infancy, and the exposure to different cultures and aesthetics for American audiences was limited to specific avenues. Outside of Speed Racer and Godzilla dubs, exposure to media like anime and manga was extremely limited.
This created a quandary for the video game industry. Primarily started in the United States and championed by companies like Atari, video games took off in the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to collapse in the mid-1980s. The marketplace became too saturated and a series of buyouts and poor management decisions effectively took the main American developers out of the driver’s seat. With Atari reeling, Japanese companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Namco reinvigorated the market in the mid 1980s, which presented its own dilemma to the developers of the hardware and software based out of Japan and the designers hired to promote their product and develop its look.
The problem was this: all of the development for these new games was occurring in Japan, but the majority of the audience for the material was in the United States. Japan has its own unique aesthetic and visual culture stretching back hundreds of years and engaged at that time with a booming market for anime and manga. It was the realm of Hello Kitty and Akira, with simplified yet dynamic forms and graphics. The United States was the realm of realism and polish, where airbrushed posters by Drew Struzan still occupied the halls and walls of movie theaters, and the majority of imagery relied on realistic rendering and natural values reminiscent of Norman Rockwell or Technicolor films.
Atari, being an American company, had been heavily influenced by the American marketplace when it started selling its games. Strongly influenced by the Bay Area and the adjacent alternative design aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s, a team of in-house designers led by George Opperman produced hand-drawn and painted illustrations for the majority of the company’s games. The aesthetics of these designs resembled what had come before, not only the psychedelia of the 60’s and 70’s, but also the airbrushed or gritty look of the paperback novel that was so popular at the time. As a result, games like “Haunted House” were presented with images that would fit neatly on the cover of a Stephen King book. The nascent video game industry in the United States developed an aesthetic that borrowed heavily from the same influences that inspired Atari.
The emerging industry had been picked up by the Japanese marketplace and transformed, but needed to be fed to an audience that, for the most part, was completely unfamiliar with the aesthetic used to develop the medium. Simplified shapes and broad expressions, a touchstone of anime and manga, worked wonderfully to instill emotion into video games that were extremely limited to what they could convey technologically.
But the box art? The assumption was that it wouldn’t sell statewide and it needed to sell in the United States! Even Pacman and Mario were re-drawn by American illustrators when marketed in the United States, which led to some truly strange and entertaining interpretations at the time. The practice was to develop games in Japan and then produce promotional material that would appeal to an American audience, either in-house or via commission to an outside vendor in the U.S.. Capcom pursued both of these avenues.
Early in the 1980s, the in-house team at Capcom would often replicate American imagery when producing material for games meant to go overseas. Good examples are in the graphics produced for games like Ghosts n’ Goblins, 1941 and the original Street Fighter. As the company grew in size and scope, they would reach out to American design firms to produce material. This practice continues intermittently to this day, but was a major part of the rollout for games in the late 80s and early 90s.
Mick McGinty was one of the American illustrators commissioned to produce the box art for the classic Capcom fighting game Street Fighter II and its various iterations across different consoles. Box art refers to the graphics put on the packaging for a game, essentially the equivalent of a book cover or movie poster.
Well known for his work in advertising and book covers, McGinty rendered the characters of the game in airbrushed realism, evoking the kind of imagery and style seen in the earlier Atari games. While successful and certainly action-packed, the artwork differed from the actual graphics of the game and the Japanese promotional artwork. This was intentional. This choice in art direction was meant to appeal to the American market which dwarfed its Japanese counterpart. As a result, the game was a rollicking success.
McGinty and others were contracted out to produce box art for Capcom games for the next few years, but the bubbling creative efforts by the Japanese team would soon explode onto the American scene, helping build the wave of anime and manga influenced art that would crest by the early 2000s.
The Early Works and Development of the Capcom Design Team
While the Capcom Design Team would grow to include dozens of artists, there are three names that stand out as foundational: Akira Yasuda (also known by the pen name Akiman), Shoei Okano, and Kinu Nishimura. Originally brought together to work on the Street Fighter series of games, they formed the nucleus that would prove to be so influential down the road. The style and working relationships established here would go on to influence later series and games that had a major impact on the business in the United States.
The first major player in this triad, Akiman, was hired by Capcom developer Yoshio Okamoto in 1985. An enigmatic employee from the start, there seems to be an unending stream of stories about Akiman’s eccentricities. He was hired without a portfolio review, stating his work had been stolen for being too good. He showed up to the interview for said job in pajamas. He made a habit out of sleeping in the office and switching suddenly between keeping his workspace either sloppy or immaculate.
This eccentricity was present in Akiman’s design work as well. When looking at his images across a 30 year span, it’s easy to see an experimental streak all the way through with little consideration paid to stylistic consistency or medium. His early work, represented in key images for games like Street Fighter 2 and 1941, reads like a heavily-western influenced style with visible brushstrokes and energetic value gradation. As time goes by, his style evolves, undulating between flat colors mixed with thin lines and impressionistic digital paintings.
As the earliest hire in the group and the main art lead, Akiman set the tone for the material to come out of the group. He designed the majority of the characters in Street Fighter 2, using a mix of expressive stereotypes, bulging anatomy and iconic posing characteristic of the games and designs that came afterward. Working essentially as the creative lead/art director for the group, he would guide new hires through the process of developing art and design for the games that made their way through the department. As a result, he is often the first name brought up in discussions of Capcom art and design in books and articles.
In 1986, a year after Akiman joined the company, Shoei Okano was hired. By 1991 he had been designated a contractor specializing in designs and illustrations, roughly a producer or editor, and guiding a growing team through the 1990s and 2000s. While producing illustrations for Street Fighter 2 and key art for other games in the early 1990s, Okano’s primary influence was as a mentor and strategic lead for the Design Team. Okano turned out to be the consummate “company man”, often the most outspoken about the work done by the team, and has provided a vast amount of commentary on the work in interviews and art books. He is also responsible for bringing in the third part of the triad, influencing the hiring of Kinu Nishimura in 1991.
One of the few women on staff in the early days of the Design Team, Kinu Nishimura became a major influence on the aesthetic put forward by the Design Team, and worked in tandem with Akiman and others to produce key art for a wide variety of titles and third-party projects and promotions.
Initially responsible for designs produced for the various iterations of Street fighter 2 that Capcom would release in the early 1990s, her work would evolve over time to represent the personality and habits of the characters she was tasked with drawing. In contrast to Akiman and many of the other artists, Nishimura often portrayed characters in lighthearted and emotional ways. While Akiman would draw the characters in iconic poses, complete with glaring eyes and tense muscles, Nishimura found great success with subdued material, such as group depictions of characters at play on the beach, or enjoying time at a cat cafe, work that added more dimensionality to the figures beyond the bombastic figurative work in other promotional material.
This team would often work together on projects under sometimes punishing deadlines. One workflow described by Okano went as follows: figurative sketches by Nishimura, touch-ups by Bengus, more on him in a bit, and final cel painting by Okano. The artists also worked in an office, so space was somewhat limited, creating a workplace reminiscent of the mythical Marvel Comics Bullpen of the 1960s in the United States, with artists essentially on top of each other working on conjoined projects in a busy, almost festive atmosphere.
Blooming from this nucleus in the early 90s, the Team got bigger and following the astronomical success of the Street Fighter 2 games in the United States, so did their workload. This growth set the tone for the designs to come with a heavy emphasis on overtly stereotyped, even discriminatory, imagery paired with a sexy, vibrant expressive/action-packed rendering that would characterize the house style of the Team. It also opened up the opportunity for more original work under that umbrella, the manga/anime contrast in style to the American pulp art used to sell most video games at that time.
With success came the need for more product. With more product came the need for more visual material. One thing led to another and innovation made its way through the system. After all, the designers could only avoid burnout for so long drawing Ryu or Chun Li the same way over and over again. Eventually, outside interests were brought in to liven up the material. Okano puts it succinctly in Street Fighter Memorial Archive: “We only turned them into cels because we all liked anime!” That influence would hit big in the years and games following the boom of Street Fighter 2, especially with the addition of artist Naoto “Bengus” Kuroshima to the team.
Bengus and the “Anime” Look
Amongst many prominent hires to the Capcom Design Team in the 1990s, perhaps the most influential in terms of imagery is Naoto “Bengus” Kuroshima. His work on a variety of titles, including Darkstalkers, Street Fighter Alpha, and the Marvel VS series left a lasting presence in the industry. His sheer output and consistency of production for over a decade set a standard still in use today. Not bad for someone who was trained as a programmer and applied to the Art Department at Capcom on a whim.
Naoto Kuroshima has gone by many different pen names, Bengus, Gouda Cheese, CRMK, etc., an admitted quirk that he adapted to after seeing his style change from title to title and wanting to create the impression that he was more than one artist for the higher-ups at the company.
Originally, Bengus was part of the background development team. At the time, this division of Capcom worked primarily on secondary sprite assets for games. That is, most of the work in this division was on non-character assets, so all the backgrounds, cut-scenes, and assets the player character would interact with.
At this time Capcom was in the process of developing a game called Vampire (later translated to Darkstalkers in the United States), which was essentially Street Fighter but with a monster mash overhaul replete with zombies, werewolves, aliens, and, well, vampires. Akiman, as a leader on the Capcom Design Team, noticed the work of a young Bengus and poached him to help develop assets and character art for the game. The decision paid dividends.
As Akiman relates in a joint interview with Bengus in Street Fighter Memorial Archive, Bengus worked with amazing speed: 50 drawings within three weeks early on in his tenure. Quite quickly, Bengus had made himself an essential member of the team.
Stylistically, Bengus’s work greatly infused manga and anime characteristics into the house look developed by designers like Akiman. Over time, especially with the introduction of digital tools, his art presented character in cleaner, less value-based designs. Relying more on flat color and strong linework, the crisp look and fast-turnaround of Bengus’s work infused fresh energy into the games.
A pivotal moment early on where this came into play was actually for a set of outside promotional images. Bengus developed the images based on the original Street Fighter game for a Japanese gaming magazine. To put this in context, imagine an artist producing official art for the original The Terminator after Terminator 2 has been a major blockbuster success. Sure, the first one was a great cult film, but the sequel made extreme amounts of money. All of the sudden, this young artist was reminding folks about a game that predated the Capcom Design Team itself. This struck a chord with the higher ups at Capcom. Why not produce a sister series of games that combined old and new characters from Street Fighter 1 and 2? Better yet, why not adapt the flatter color scheme and anime style of Darkstalkers that the Capcom Design Team, and Bengus in particular, so strongly influenced?
This led to the development of Street Fighter Alpha, which had a much stronger anime aesthetic than the main series. This was present in the promotional art as well, and helped to refine the house-look of the Capcom Design Team into a distinct mixture of extreme physiques and slick-anime-inspired imagery. Built up layers of acrylic and watercolor were swapped out for expressive linework and limited color palettes.
This stylistic change would soon combine with an iconic American property to usher in some of the first major incursions of Japanese design aesthetics into the U.S. marketplace.
Marvel, Mutants, and the Manga Breakthrough
The Capcom Design Team worked diligently throughout the 1990s, and the images Bengus produced continued to have a major influence of the promotional imagery for the games and the in-game sprites and character designs.
While front-facing artwork was still being farmed out to American designers, such as the box art for Street Fighter Alpha, a revisited working relationship with an American comic book company would open the door to the anime-inspired look that was becoming predominant in the Capcom Design Team’s work.
In 1994, Capcom released “X-Men: Children of the Atom”, a fighting game based on the seminal Marvel comics series of the same name. Capcom staff artist Katsuya Akitomo, an exuberant American comics fan, spearheaded the effort and introduced the staff to the bombastic stories and artwork of the series. At the time, the look of the comics was defined by Jim Lee, a superstar artist at Marvel, and artist of the best-selling X-Men Number One.
Lee’s artwork was the front-facing representation of the game, including on arcade cabinets and advertisements. Several in-game graphics were also translated directly from Lee’s comics work, but in-game character designs were an amalgamation of the American and Japanese aesthetics. The door was cracked open for avid Marvel fans to see something new and different from their usual fare.
Children of the Atom was a successful game for Capcom, and another fighting game, Marvel SuperHeroes, followed soon after. The anime style heavily inspired the game design, and with rumbling success. It was only a matter of time before Capcom proposed a novel concept: a crossover game featuring Marvel and Street Fighter characters.
Released in 1996, X-Men vs. Street Fighter was a dam-breaking development. Let’s try to put this into context:
when growing up as a millennial in the 90s, most visual culture was filtered through two predominant illustration styles: the Airbrushed look of Disney Animated VHS covers (the natural descendant of the rendered paperback book cover or pulp movie poster that also influenced the Atari look) and the line-art based, colored-key newsprint look of the American comic.
When X-Men vs. Streetfighter comes out in 1996, all of the sudden you see this iconic American character, Cyclops, shaking hands with Ryu, the primary protagonist of the Street Fighter series on the attract screen- it’s one of the primary graphics flashing on the Arcade screen when you went to go get pizza or to hang out at the mall. And it doesn’t look like the Cyclops you’ve grown up with. The lines are smoother, the colors are bolder, and the faces and body language are more expressive. Bengus is the artist behind the image, and Bengus’s artwork has a definitive “Japanese” look to it.
This is a convergence point. It’s not the only one. Japanese culture and style had been seeping into the American conscience since the 1960s (Godzilla, Robotech, Hello Kitty, Chrono Trigger) but this adaptation of characters like Wolverine and Spiderman into anime style characters had a lasting influence, one that would grow with the success of soon-to-be released Marvel vs Capcom and its sequels.
After the games came out, the cases of diverging styles in promoting the work dips. The Capcom Design Team starts facing forward from then on with the work of Bengus, Akiman and Nishimura and others on the team appearing more in American advertising and promotional material. Follow-up games and changing technology also help keep the work dynamic and fresh.
Games like Rival Schools, Street Fighter EX, Star Gladiator and Red Earth, while not as profitable as the Marvel vs series, continued to cement the Capcom “look” in American gaming culture, despite lagging arcade business in the early 2000s.
By the time Street Fighter III was released in 1997, there was no American-produced art used to promote it. The same is true for the initial release of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes in 2000. By this point the breakthrough is complete. It is Bengus’s art, supplemented with digital color and hyperactive linework, that graces the side of the arcade machine.
At this point, art and imagery from the Capcom Design Team is sharing real estate in the mall and department store with properties like Pokemon and DVDs like Princess Mononoke, part of a full-fledged explosion of Japanese aesthetics that continues to this day.
In the early 2000s, the team started to see external promotion from Capcom, despite the transition to freelance design by notable members like Akiman and Bengus. By 2005, English translations of the Japanese artbooks, a major trend in Japan, started hitting bookshelves in the United States, initially as imports and then as full translations.
Following on from the rise in popularity of the coffee table art book, these huge volumes contain production and promo art, interviews and more celebrating the work of the Capcom Art Department. The continuous publication of these books, along with the advent of manga sections in book departments of retailers like Walmart, speaks to the popularity of the style. It makes sense that this material has proven inspirational to the designers and illustrators that followed.
Lasting Influence
The high point of the Capcom Design Team coincided with the end of Capcom’s first major foray into fighting games, roughly into the mid 2000s. While the genre essentially went into hibernation for a few years, the influence of the Design Team was evident in other venues.
The biggest influence was visible in the output of a small comic publishing firm in Canada, UDON comics. Hendershot points out that UDON was founded after a split from a previous publisher, Toronto-based Dreamwave. Led by editor/publisher Erik Ko, UDON’s artists worked together in cramped quarters and produced art inspired by the fusion of anime aesthetics and exaggerated yet accurate anatomy of the Capcom Design Team. They were so inspired that, after some false starts, they reached out to Capcom to get the publication rights for the characters from Capcom’s various fighting games, including Street Fighter and Darkstalkers.
They found that, with the series dormant at the time, the licensing rights were actually affordable, and they took it up. Since then, UDON has been the primary North American source for stories and artwork of the characters. Indeed, in a full circle moment, UDON has produced official artwork for Capcom games in the time since the partnership formed, most notably in Tatsunoko vs Capcom and Street Fighter 2 HD edition.
This full-circle relationship, with North American artists emulating a Japanese style for publication internationally, 15 or so years removed from American-inspired initial designs of Street fighter 2, shows just how influential the work of the Design Team was, and how transformative it was to North American designers in the 1990s.
And it’s not an isolated incident. Recent games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4, send ups of early 90s games sold using the American style of rendered paintings, now use the flat coloring and line-based art seen in the later work of the Capcom Design Team. The design aesthetics are now seen as a viable form of presentation, even for retro-titles seeking nostalgia buys.
Currently the artists that made up the 1990s Capcom Design Team work in a variety of companies and capacities. They are still brought in for special projects, such as special art produced for Street Fighter 6, and the volumes of work collected in paperbacks and artbooks.
Outro
The work of the Capcom Design Team was a major part of the changing aesthetic that occurred in the video game promotion industry in the 1990s. It inspired illustrators all over the world, and opened up stylistic avenues on both sides of the Pacific. While the merits are debatable, the success isn’t, and the artwork continues to excite and motivate both young and veteran artists.
Credits:
This episode was produced with the aid of a grant from the University of Central Oklahoma
Research & Writing credits for this episode are from – XXXXX
With additional research assistance provided by – XXXXX
Story editing provided by Spencer Gee
Sound design/engineering – By the University of Central Oklahoma’s Center for eLearning and Connected Environments
Music by Christina Giacona and Patrick Conlon of Onyx Lane
Contact:
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