Fatal Fury backgrounds

Fatal Fury was better on it's backgrounds than Street Fighter. Of course, it also came out a few years later, so they had the benefit of better technology and more experience. Even so, Fatal Fury's backgrounds---like every other aspect of the game today---are crude and primitive compared to what was to follow. SNK really liked to have crowd scenes; folks sitting around watching the fight.

Unfortunately, they used the exact same people in every background, and they only had about six of them. If you scrolled a little bit to the left or right they started repeating themselves. The people also looked really strange and cartoony. Still, there was room to improve on that front in years to come.

However, even in this picture of South Beach at sunset, you can see the pretty nifty Toyota Jeep, the detailed palm trees, and the very pretty view fo the city across the harbor.

Another notable feature of SNK backgrounds is that they often changed as you completed more rounds. The typical progression was that they had a version that took place during the day, one at sunset and one after dark. This was originally simply accomplished by switching up the palette of colors used in the image, but in later games, this often became more sophisticated; my favorite such background progression is the Park from King of Fighters '99. The first image is a beautiful day in the park and all kinds of people are out. The second image removes most of the people, turns it into a dark cloudy sky with a few animated bits of lightning and a few patters of rain in the foreground. Finally, it's pouring down rain, the entire background turns washed out and blurry.

Great progression. But still many years to come. For now, we've got my personal favorites from Fatal Fury: Tung Fu Rue's stage, and the final stage of Geese himself:

Tung Fu Rue's stage gets rain in the second round too, but it looks terrible.

The Fatal Fury soundtrack doesn't really stand out to me, but I have a lot to say about Fatal Fury 2 and Fatal Fury Special. But before I do that, I'll have a look at the Street Fighter 2 backgrounds and BGM tracks.