Darkstalkers- Poll Win & Thoughts (Patreon)

Well well!

Darkstalkers/Vampire Hunter won the poll so that'll be the next print! I shall get working on it posthaste.

Darkstalkers was released in arcades in 1994, with character designs by Capcom's god-tier artist BENGUS, who had designed all the Streetfighter characters and had just done really beautiful character designs for Super Streetfighter II the year before.

Easily one of my favourite character designers of all time, and the mid 90s was his absolute peak if you ask me:

The series was quite popular, (though never reached Streetfighter's levels of success), with several sequels and ports to home systems, the best of which were, as usual the Sega Saturn versions, being a 2D powerhouse of a machine compared the the PS1's more 3D-geared architecture.

90s anime deity-tier studio MADHOUSE released a 4-part OVA based on the games in 1997, and it's really rather good!

One of the things that makes this stand out in a sea of videogame anime adaptations is that it replicates the move sets of the characters very faithfully, right down to combos and other minutiae that normally never make it into anime versions of fighting games. You can tell Madhouse really did their research when planning out the fight scenes.

And then there was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfzdUQbeHpgA feast for the eyes and mind courtesy of American animation studio Graz Entertainment, who also did the American Streetfighter cartoon. Apparently, "With an enormous built-in audience of young arcade players across the nation and a colorful range of fun, but spooky characters who lend themselves so well to animated television, we're confident that Darkstalkers will be a big hit with kids everywhere. This show will make it hip to be scared. ... It's this decade's answer to the popular Ghostbusters sensation of the 80s."

It was cancelled after 13 episodes, and historians have yet to discover anyone who found it hip to be scared.

-Paul