![]() ![]() So it always helps when the North America publisher of a game helps us promote the books." Great art books aren’t just from series of yesteryear. Sometimes, we know the audience is there but not how to let them know about the art book. Moylan says that " the biggest challenge is getting the word out to each audience. ![]() In particular, the afore-mentioned underground status they still seem to have in the West. Still, the art book game comes with its share of challenges. These days, Udon publishes a range of books from the various Capcom properties like Darkstalkers and Okami to Atlus’ Persona series, all of which have vocal and insatiable fans. And then from there we diversified more with anime and manga art books." "From there," he continues, "it wasn’t too long before we started picking up art books from other game companies and studios - SEGA, Atlus, Nippon Ichi, Platinum, Bandai, Blizzard, and others. We picked up some other Capcom art books for games like Okami and Mega Man Zero, as well as various Street Fighter manga." Some of the manga had never been localized in English, something else to diversify their output. "After that book did well it did become a more planned effort to diversify both our product offerings and properties. "Initially with Eternal Challenge it was just something else to try," says Moylan. Two, it opened up the doors to a more diverse range of games and franchises for them to take a shot at publishing. One, it strengthened the relationship that Udon had with Capcom, which still thrives to this day. While Capcom had released a series of books in Asia that bound a variety of sketch, production, and promotional art in them, none of them official made it to the west without tracking down an importer and paying the hefty fees that came with them.Įternal Challenge panned out for the small publisher in two significant ways. ![]() "It was a natural extension of our Street Fighter comics line, and also something of an experiment to see if the comic fans would extend their interest to art book." Eternal Challenge was a learning experience, but a successful one. "The first art book we published Street Fighter: Eternal Challenge, a book made at that time for the 15th anniversary of Street Fighter," says Matt Moylan, Udon’s Director of Publishing. Street Fighter Eternal Challenge was Udon’s first video game art book. The comics found a fanbase, and after some initial success, it was time for something of a calculated gamble. Many are published by the series’ own developers, making the breadth of output a bit niche among the niche.īorn as a Canadian art studio in the early 2000s, Udon scored the publishing rights to Street Fighter franchise, and quickly went to work with a new comic book series at a time when most thought the fighting game genre was a relic of the 1990s arcade ruins. While the more popular annualized Western franchises receive the art book treatment these days, this is only as recent as the last console generation. Here in the West, it still takes some work to track many of them down. In Japan, art books have been promotional and even newsstand items since the late 1980s. For world-building enthusiasts, they’re the lost ark of what never made it into the final product.īut they’re also still fairly uncommon, and make them remain a badge of honor for those Dark Souls and SNK true believers. For budding artists, they’re a look behind the character design curtain. Good art books, even those with a smaller number of pages, manage to pull all of these off in one fell swoop. Every fan of every game wants to dig deeper into its world, and the game itself is sometimes never enough.Īnd lo, the art book was born an artifact for the super fan that can chronicle the conceptual phases, the marketing campaigns, and innermost thoughts and ideas from a game or series’ design staff. Sure, we’ve definitely shed our tears over the Valkyria Chronicles and Breath of Fires that have withered and faded over the past few years, but even those dearly departed series had not only their share of fans, but also piles of production design, promotional art, and lore to analyze by their once-ravenous fan base. Unlike the modern "geek culture" that’s packaged and sold by movie mega franchises, the history of video games has lived and died on long-running series and spinoffs that rarely age out. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.įandom in gaming circles is a curious beast. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. ![]()
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