reject commercialism embrace doujin


One thing I've always wanted to research more is Strongest Street Gamer Legend Virtua Junkie, a comic about Virtua Fighter players released at the peak of Virtua Fighter 2 mania. I've only ever found these sub-par scans online (of which this is just a sampling, I've got two whole chapters), but boy, this looks like a trip.

Virtua Junkie was originally published in a short-lived manga anthology, Comic Teioh, sometime between 1995 and 1996. Chapters are... well, you can get an idea from the stuff above. Think "sports manga but it's Virtua Fighter," complete with dramatic interpretations of in-game fights. The chapters would end with VF gameplay tips and a column about the latest news about AM2 and Sega's other arcade games, including the very historically important (to AM2 nerds) Polygon Junkie live events.

I kinda want to track down the issues Virtua Junkie ran in to get better scans (it was never compiled in a tankouban, as it only ran six chapters), but I feel like some might be floating around somewhere already, as there have been Nico Nico compilation videos made of the various chapters. Well, it's good that the whole thing is preserved publicly in some form, but manga really needs to be experience in paged format, y'know?

By the by, was "Street Gamer" a phrase in mid-90s arcade culture in Japan? The arcade-focused JP magazine Game Yuu II (which, BTW, I sent several issues off to Gaming Alexandria for scanning) called itself the BIBLE OF STREET GAMERS!!!! But I don't recall that terminology turning up much in the likes of Gamest or other kakuge-focused publications. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.


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