Despite the growth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel’s presence in video games has had its ups and downs. Marvel’s recent venues into the video game industry have only led to fans longing for the yesteryear of masterpiece collaborations with video game publishers and developers, most notably being Capcom’s Marvel vs. Capcom series. With the sudden surge in popularity of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 with the #freemarvel and #freemvc2 hashtags, it’s high time to take a look at the origins of the series with the ground-breaking X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
While Capcom is famous for its own original IPs such as Mega Man and Resident Evil, they were also one of the top developers for licensed games like DuckTales and Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. Capcom’s Marvel arcade collaborations were among the most popular and famous, starting with The Punisher arcade game as well as the fighting games X-Men: Children of Atom and Marvel Super Heroes. With the use of the same engine as Street Fighter Alpha, crossover between the Marvel heroes was inevitable, with the release of X-Men vs. Street Fighter creating a brand-new sub-genre of fighting games as a whole.
X-Men vs. Street Fighter plays similarly to Capcom’s other 2D fighting games where two players (or one player against a CPU) are pitted against each other on a stage, picking from a roster of characters with a variety of different abilities. Borrowing assets and characters from X-Men: Children of the Atom and Street Fighter Alpha, every character retains most of their special moves and attributes from their respective games. There are eight X-Men characters and nine Street Fighter characters, bringing the roster to a then-impressive amount of 17 playable characters, including iconic heroes and villains from both companies.
Alongside the return of aerial combos from the previous Capcom-developed Marvel games, the main gimmick that sets the game apart from its predecessors is the innovative tag team system and its 2v2 battles. Matches only last a single round instead of the typical two-out-of-three, focusing on depleting the health of both the opponent’s selected characters, leading to potential comebacks from defeated players and adding an extra layer of variety to the overall match. The player can switch between characters at any time in the middle of a round, but can also combine special finishing moves into one massive attack with a high damage output–the Crossover Combination.
The refinement of aerial battles, the tag-team system and the sheer novelty of some of the most famous superheroes fighting the some of the most famous video game characters all made sure that X-Men vs. Street Fighter had an incredibly strong foundation for the Capcom Vs. franchise to stand upon. Later games would implement elements such as reaching up to three playable characters and the Variable Assist, where a player could call in their second or third chosen character to perform a special move in the middle of the round without switching characters. Naturally, the roster would expand from only X-Men and Street Fighters to characters that encompass all over the universes of both Marvel and Capcom.
All other Marvel vs. Capcom games would follow X-Men vs. Street Fighter‘s example, but a combination of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite‘s failure, Capcom’s apparent declining interest in fighting games beyond Street Fighter V and Marvel’s bias towards MCU-represented characters has led to the crossover franchise stagnating. With Marvel’s re-acquisition of Fox properties and the current popularity of fighting games as a whole, hopefully one day Marvel will realize that the audience for Marvel vs. Capcom team-games is still high.
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