I can’t remember when I bought Eternal Champions, which is annoying because I always remember obscure purchases to the detriment of remembering genuinely useful things. Besides the fact it would have been a Mega Drive game I hadn’t seen before, I can be fairly confident that the game cover sold it to me. I would have been about 10 at the time and my sole reference point was occasional games magazines and a lot of browsing shelves and thinking ‘ooh, that looks good’ in that way that only a 10-year-old can truly do in the appropriate way.
A brief Google while writing this has taught me that the wondrous cover was painted by Julie Bell, an American illustrator and fantasy artist. I love it. I love all the artwork to do with Eternal Champions. Ignore my words for a moment and look at those screenshots and the photos from the manual. Lovely character models, aren’t they? They’re mostly courtesy of Ernie Chan, a comic book artist, who worked on a lot of DC and Marvel comics during the 1970s.
None of this would matter if the game lacked personality and wonder, but it has both. It’s also a rock solid fighting game that even now I struggle to succeed at. While I can’t remember the timing, I know I bought it because my best mate had Street Fighter 2 on the SNES and I couldn’t find the Mega Drive version. Mortal Kombat scared me (I was a wimpy kid) so that was out of the question other than brave gazes at a demo machine in a local computer store. Eternal Champions felt like it was somewhere in between those two.
