Retronauts - 620: The Capcom Marvel Universe

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Before there was an MCU, video game arcades played host to the CMU. Join Diamond Feit, Kevin Bunch, and John Learned as they recount the early 90s giant-sized collaboration between Capcom and Marvel. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This weekend Retronauts, now bear my optic blast. and eight. That's right. We've crossed the threshold. And welcome back to another episode about fighting games. Well, mostly fighting games. Well, mostly Capcom games. Well, let's just wrap it up. Let's call this the Capcom Marvel Universe. Yes, yes, yes. Before there was a Marvel Cinematic Universe at MCU. There was the CMU. That's my joke. Copyright. Diamond Fight. That's my name. And who's joining me on this podcast? Why don't we start in the great state of Ohio? It's so great.

It's got a great lake. Hi, let's go, Bob. I'm John Lernod. Wonderful. And joining me in a different state that I actually not sure which state it is. The land of Old Bay. It's Kevin Bunch. Okay, I know where that is.

Yeah, yeah, that's the lovely, lovely country. Okay. So what are we doing today? Yes. as I've explained at the top we're gathered here today three fighting game fans talk about the era in which Capcom

took a broad swath of Marvel characters and threw them into a blender and said we're going to make a bunch of games with these Marvel characters and who knows what's going to happen in our collective opinion I'm going to say some pretty cool stuff happened that's my bold stand here

pretty cool stuff happened when Capcom played with Marvel couldn't care Hmm. Now, I know all of you played fighting games, plenty of fighting games, but I'm curious, what, if anything, what were you doing in the early 90s as far as comic books and Marvel Comics? Were you fans, or were these games introducing to characters you didn't already know? Where were you at in the early 90s? Uh, so I'll go first, I guess. I was interested in Marvel Comics, but I had no idea where to jump in on any of them, because it's pretty inscrutable to a new, comer, as I think everyone knows. But I was a huge fan of the X-Men cartoon, so I watched that religiously every single week that it aired, even when it was getting into repeats or the episodes were out

of order, which they frequently were. I did check out a few of the other shows here and there, a little bit of Spider-Man, a little bit of Iron Man. I think that was the show. It was. But, yeah, those didn't stick with me quite like the X-Men did. So naturally, I'm really excited about a number of the games on here because they're very X-Men-centric. Yeah, we're going to talk about a bunch of X-Men.

And it's great, it's already plural. There is no X-Men, it's just X-Men, you know, on the episode today. I know there was an X-Man. Don't look for me. It's fine. It's the X-Men and the ex-Lady Men. Yeah. How about you, John?

So I got into comics pretty young. My parents were the kind of people that would, like, throw a Batman comic in in a stocking for me every Christmas thinking eventually I would take to that. And then when I eventually did, I was 11 when Jim Lee and Chris Claremont's X-Men number one came out. And that was like the moment for me. So I was very, very into X-Men. I was very into comics. You know, as an 11-year-old, it's not like you're buying comics constantly, but like I would get what I could.

And eventually I got my two older brothers, they were into it too. And so all of this stuff, like, was this sweet spot for me. I was a freshman in high school when Children of the Adam came out. I eventually worked in my local comic book shop for a summer when I was 16, very, very into the X-Men at this point. And then comics in general. And then I, like, took a hard pivot and was very into Batman after that. Never really looked back. Sorry, X-Men.

But, but yeah, this was my thing. I was very invested in all of this. All right. Well, I'm sorry. We really, that'll be the end of the Batman talk. We're not doing any Batman talk today. Maybe we can get back to our Shinobi episode. Our long-rumored Shinobi episode, we come to Batman.

But for now, we're strictly Marvel, baby. Well, Spider-Man in Shinobi. Yeah. There's some overlap there. That's another crossover, yeah. As for me, no one asked, but I'll just say my answer. I read comics at an early age, and I was also there in the early 80s when Marvel cartoons first propped up there. You know, Spider-Man and his amazing friends.

I mean, let's be honest, I was more into the Spider-Man than the Amazing. friend part. But, you know, they're good friends. They're suitable friends, I would say, stable friends. They were ex-friends. Yes. I think, yeah, because one of them, I guess both of his friends eventually spun into X-Men characters, right? Firestar was... Iceman. Iceman was a founding X-Men character. Firestorm was created for that show, but they were... Okay, now we're off track. But, like, they were trying to spin off an X-Men TV show from Spider-Man and his amazing friends,

and they show up in a couple of episodes, like Wolverine and Nightcrawler or whatever. Magneto. Yeah. Or was that Fantastic Four? Well, that's, yeah, there's, well, there is that, yeah, there's an infamous episode where Magneto faced the Fantastic Four and Reed Richards doops him out with a wooden gun. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah.

Not one of, not one of Magneto's proudest moments when he got pulled by wooden gun. But it's okay. It's all right. Well, we'll get back to Magneto later. But the point is, um, when I was a young man in the early. I'd say middle, middle 80s, Marvel had a big event for their 25th anniversary where all the issues had a big plate on the front,

almost like a Konami, almost like a great Konami plate, except for a bunch of Marvel characters, which is how I discovered the X-Men via the mutant massacre. Wow. Which is a great entry point, especially for me as a young Jewish kid, you know, so I was like, oh, oh, they're putting the metaphor up front here. Okay, okay.

Magneto just says it. Magneto just says it. Oh, it's like, it's like, the death camps of my childhood. I'm like, oh, that's what this story is about? Okay. It's fine. I renew with the death camps. It's all right. I was Jewish. You know what? Let's spin away from that topic. And the point is, the point is, when Capcom put these games out in the 90s, I was already there for Street Fighter. So I was like, oh, wow. So it's like a Street Fighter, but it's got other characters that I know and they're cool characters, you know. And like Kevin, I was definitely watching the X-Men cartoon. Hell,

I watched Pride of the X-Men. That's where I was at. I love Pride of the X-Men. Yeah, it's good. I mean, Australian Wolverine, not great, although prophetic, prophetic in a way. That's how we get Australia and Wolverine today. That's true. It looks, it just looks good. Like, if you don't know what we're talking about, Marvel tried to, they made a pilot episode of an X-Men TV show that has come to be known as Pride of the X-Men. And it was in like the late 80s. I can't remember the year exactly, but this eventually,

89. Okay. So this led to the Konami arcade beat him up, which we're going to touch on it a little bit too. But it is a weird episode of a TV show. It's pretty easy to find on the internet if you dig around a little bit. But like Wolverine has an Australian accent because that's what Canadians sound like apparently. And it had like what we consider like the classic 80s lineup. So Cyclops Nightcrawler, dazzlers in their colossus. It's the first, it's when Kitty Pride shows up at the X-Men. Mansion for the first time. And it's this beautiful, it's animated by a Japanese company. I can't remember which one, but it is absolutely gorgeous. So just watch it once. It's kind of dumb, but it's worth seeing once. Right. And it didn't take off. It was a pilot only. It did not go to the series. But a couple of years later, a different show about the X-Men did go to series. I would say one that has a lot longer legacy. I mean, as we're recording this, we're, you know, they're about to show a brand new cartoon on Disney, which is, I think they're calling X-Men 97,

like they're picking up where the old show left off. Yeah. So we know inside information. We don't know if that show is good or not, but it's just, it's a sign of how popularity of that 92 show has lingered, you know, even all these decades later, even though I would say if you watch that show, it doesn't look so hot, but, you know, there's,

it's, you know, the actors are trying their best, and certainly the writers are trying to tell stories that are X-Men stories. and certainly that's going to have a lot of influence over the games we're going to talk about today because that show was on the air and was very popular, so direct vis-à-vis involvement. I look forward to that show coming back and having an actual budget for combat sequences because the old one sure didn't. I can only hope.

I can only hope they have some more money these days. I've got Marvel Cash. Okay, yeah, but are they going to spend it as a question? There you know. But we're not just, we're not just flapping our gums here because we are trying to set the stage here because we want to give you a glimpse of what the world was like in the early 90s, okay? Obviously, if you're a video game fan, if you're a bunch ofouts fan, then you know Street Fighter 2 is out, and you know Street Fighter 2 is the big deal. Like, everyone's already played Street Fighter 2. They are playing, you know, we've got revisions of Street Fighter 2 in arcades.

And by now, you know, 92, 93, 94, like everyone's had a try at their version of Street Fighter. Like, there's a lot of fighting games on the market, okay? Some of them are very good. Some of them are kind of forgettable. Some of them are Mortal Kombat. Wow. But they're out there. So it's like, it's a crowded marketplace.

and superheroes are pretty big, and I think a lot of that, well, I lied, John. We'll talk about Batman again because let's face it. Batman, the movie, made a lot of money in 1989, and Batman, the cartoon show was also on the air doing very well, and that certainly informed the popularity of a lot of superhero properties in the early 90s that weren't Batman, but still, it's like, it's superhero, let's try and make this, let's try and make this. I mean, hell, they made a Dick Tracy movie, okay? They made a Dick Tracy movie in the 90s, all right? When the average Dick Tracy reader was probably in their 70s. Hey, they dug the Phantom and the Shadow out of the crypt for the 90s, too. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, Slam Evil. Okay, I was there. I was there. I was selling tickets, but I was there. I like that dumb movie. They were both pretty good, actually. Yeah, I think the Shadow gets a much worse rap than it deserves. It's not good, but it's, I think at least the Phantom is pulpy and fun.

That is a good one for, like, small children, I think. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And certainly with the passing of, oh, God, Treat Williams. He is great in the Phantom. He is, like, he's the bad guy, but he makes the bad guy, like, special. So he's a would delight in that film. Comic books, I think, in general, are doing pretty well.

You've had a lot of, like, high-profile events. DC and Marvel. I mean, DC had Superman just. die in what, 92, 93, and then there was a whole, like, power struggle to get, like, new Superman back and the Superman comes back. And, like, there's a lot going on. But as you put in the notes here, John, Marvel is a company not doing so well. So, yeah, so comic books were finding themselves in a very interesting position post-Batman 89, and that, like, you know, the industry to consumers wasn't bad, and Batman really gave them a shot in the arm. But that's also about the time.

when, like, people were finding issues of, like, Detective Comics 27 in their attic or, you know, Superman number one in their grandpa's basement or something like that. I mean, they were doing, this wasn't happening all the time, but, like, these big news stories were coming out where, like, people are finding these ancient Holy Grail comic books. And that really set off a, what we call the speculator boom. So, like, oh, my God, I'm just going to buy all these comics and get rich off of them someday. So, like, the retail side just exploded for years and for a few years. And the major players, meaning Marvel and DC, at least initially, were really leaning into it in sort of the worst way. Like, you know, we're launching a bunch of new series. We're rebooting series with like multiple covers and stuff like that. And that's where we got in 1991, the Jim Lee X-Men Volume 2, which is still as of now and we'll probably forever be the highest selling comic of all time because it came out with five different covers and everyone was buying multiple covers of it. And this gimmick just sort of like bled out into the rest of the industry. So like now we're releasing X-Force number one with five different covers. And they're all bagged with a trading card.

And if you don't have a bagged copy with a trading card, it's not going to be worth anything. So people are buying for sort of the wrong reasons. You know, you buy things for whatever reasons you want. But like they were expecting that they were going to retire and send their kids to to college on like a comic book that just came out six weeks ago. And eventually that leads to a massive collapse, right? So the bubble burst, this is even before I was working in a comic book shop. So, like, this was like the early mid-90s, so like 93, 94, 95.

And, you know, the interest in back issues and, like, older issues of comics was drying up back to, like, even pre-Batman 89 levels. Like, you know, all these people gobbled up all these old comics and all of a sudden, all these retailers are sitting around with, like, piles of boxes of books. they're no longer selling and guys are even looking at each other like this is just expensive wallpaper we're putting huge price tags on issues where wolverine fights the hulk and no one gives a shit anymore so a bunch of comic shops uh closed up marvel found themselves in a pretty lousy position in that like their the x-men were kind of keeping the lights on because they had the tv show that was doing pretty well on fox the issues of the ex books were still doing pretty well spider man was still a thing everybody loves spider man so like the spider-man

and stuff was still kind of selling. But past that, it was, they were careening into a bankruptcy, which is why it took forever for the Disney Marvel movies with Spider-Man to be in them to exist because like Marvel, when they were so broke, they were like selling off movie rights for like characters like the Fantastic Four and Ghost Writer and Spider-Man to anybody that would pay them, essentially, and in perpetuity, which is why we're only getting another Fantastic Four movie now. after two really bad Fantastic War movies because they sold the rights to Fox for those characters

in perpetuity. That's how bad off, bad off things were. So, yeah, like, Capcom was in a very good position with the success of Street Fighter 2 and, like, the various other things that they were doing to be like, hey, we'll pay you some money to do whatever we want. And what we'll see is that they're going to get away with a lot that current Marvel would never, ever, ever let them do. And didn't let them do last time they teamed up. Yeah, that's true, right. Yeah, it's funny.

You know, the superhero boom, which was started by essentially, you know, a big hit movie, Marvel, I think, probably assumed, oh, well, we've got lots of characters, let's get our characters on the big screen. And it just, it took a long time for that to happen and then for it to actually work, you know? Because if you look at the Marvel movies

of the early 90s, Um, not good. Yeesh. Not, not good. No. No. Um, and I would say things didn't really get good until I would say, I mean, Blade is 89 and X-Men is 2000.

And then, then you start to see some, some good quality stuff going on. But in the early 90s, yeah, no, no. Um, and John, you said two bad, Fantastic Four movies is that there was another fantastic movie that was technically not released, but technically made, you know? and that's a whole other story. That is also somewhere on the internet that you should watch once. Believe us, please do this. Oh, oh boy.

Get your friends, get on the couch, get a bunch of whatever you can put in your stomach, and watch this Fantastic Four quote movie. The Roger Corman version, you know? Yeah, as I recall, I think I was seeing that movie. This was around the time when I started to go to Star Trek conventions. And I remember, like, Star Trek conventions at that day and age, were like just a wild west of like, you went to dealer tables, you had no idea what they were selling.

Oh, yeah. And there'd be like, you know, just rows and rows of VHS, you know, fan sub things from other countries and bootleg copies of things that shouldn't be selling. And definitely on those tables, I would have seen, like, you know, Roger Corman's Fantastic Four. Like, there's a Fantastic Four movie? What? And then, you know, then you look it up, you're like, oh, okay. There sure was.

I used to go to a lot of, um, like, they had these, like, pop culture shows and, my local mall where like once every couple of of months like comic book dealers would come in from out of state um like guys that would collect posters once she posters from movie theaters and things like that they would come in and sell this stuff and i met a guy who had a roger corman fantastic four movie poster and that's the first time i had heard of it too i'm like what is this and he just like pulls up a chair it's like like dangerous minds he pulls up a chair he turns around he's like well listen here kid You like those comic books, those funny papers?

Let me tell you all about it. I was not prepared for that conversation. Well, what, let's talk with something that does come out, and I would argue is, is worth talking about at length. And that is the first game that Capcom makes with Marvel characters in it of this generation. And that is The Punisher. You thought I was going to say X-Men, but no, this whole story starts with The Punisher in 1993. And in the case of Capcom, their version of the Punisher is a two-player, side-scrolling, beat them up. So, you know, I would say a little behind the times, and that by this point,

fighting games are huge and beat-em-ups are less huge. But if they are huge, like, they have a lot of characters, you know, four characters, six characters, that's the thing. So only two characters, number one being the Punisher, player two being Nick Fury, the white Nick Fury. I would say maybe a little bit past the prime of the genre, but still, all in all, I would say, decent for what is doing, right? Yeah, you know, I get the sense that, I mean, there must have still been a market for these because Capcom kept making them, Konami kept making them, like S&K had a few on the Neo Geo through the mid-90s. So they might not have been huge sellers, but probably I get the sense that if you had like a cabinet sitting around a game that wasn't making a lot of money, here's a two-player game that doesn't take a lot of buttons and extra hardware. Pop it in. It'll make some cash because the Punisher, people like him.

I always thought this was a strange choice for a beat-em-up. Like, as a character, it makes sense in the context of the game when you play it because it is incredibly violent. And that's something I think that we should talk about, too, is how it got that way. But, like, there's a point at the end of, like, maybe the first level where the Punisher, like, picks up a mook and, like, shakes him, like, puts a gun at his face and shakes him down for information. And this scared doofus gives it to him. The Punisher shoots him in the face anyway. And then it runs off. I'm like, that is not what I was.

Like the Fantastic Four poster story, it's something I was not expecting to see. But it is on brand for the Punisher. sure. I got to give it that. Right. So this was an Akiman joint. Yes. This is something that he was basically the lead on. And according to the notes here, like he was the planter and the visual designer. So he was doing a lot of the animation, like what they called the dot art, so the pixel animation himself. And about halfway through development, a person that will come up in this conversation an awful lot. A man named Katsia Acom came in to Capcom, and Akimoto wanted to be an artist. So he came in as a pixel guy, a dot artist. But he is a huge, huge, huge American

comic book fan, which in Japan at the time is exceedingly rare. I would say it's probably still on the rare side today. Like, you can walk around Japan and you will see Marvel branding and Marvel merchandise everywhere, but it's like, a good chunk of it is just like the world. Marvel. Like, Marvel is a huge brand here, but how many Japanese people know Marvel characters as comic book characters? I would say, very, very small. Like, they've all seen them, like, my wife's seen a bunch of Marvel movies. She can, she can talk about the movies, but, like, does she know any Marvel comic book characters? I don't think so. I really do. Yeah. Well, he is a guy that, like, got into Spider-Man very young, and that that kind of ignited his interest

in Western comics. So it's not just Marvel and DC stuff. He's just into Western comics. So he came in and was like, this is kind of a big, goofy game. Like, you know, I guess he would get into fights with Akiman about like the size of the kingpin, who's the final boss of the game.

Like the kingpin takes up the entire screen. And like he would say, no, he is a human being. He's supposed to be big, but not like how big the juggernaut essentially is in the later games, right? So they went to, or he pushed along with the,

American side of Capcom to like make the Punisher more on brand like you were saying Kevin so like a lot more violent doesn't he's he's more like the stoic killer of like crime bosses and organized crime that kind of thing um they had to change how Nick Fury looked because he looked too close like in the classic blue body suit of Nick Fury they had he looked too close to how the Punisher looked in the game so Akimoto came in and said okay like everybody stop what you're doing here's a bunch of of a bunch of American comic books that you should read. I translated them all for you because you don't speak the language.

Just read this stuff and you'll get it. And they eventually did. And so they made the game. They made the game according to how the American side of Capcom kind of saw it too, but they still didn't really know what the Capcom side was doing. So it did be, I mean, we're not talking like gory, excessive, like body parts flying everywhere violent, but it is a pretty violent game. And in the end, the game.

the game did okay, but even the Marvel side was like, whoa, you guys really kind of went for it as far as like Punisher shooting folks, right? And they were like, yeah, we did. And so there was some tension a little bit between Marvel, according to Akimoto, between Marvel and Capcom after the Punisher was over. Because it wasn't a gangbuster seller, but I don't think, again, to your guys's point, anybody should have expected it to be because it was a side-scrolling brawler in 90s. but it's still an interesting game. Yeah, and we should mention the shooting part is not just for cutscenes. Like, during the gameplay, when you're not punching and kicking guys, you can get guns and you can shoot guys in the game with your guns. So, like, it's a mix of brawling and shooting, like, you get limited ammo at times. And, yeah, there's definitely, there's some moments where you're, you know, people are dying. But it's kind of weird, like, as typical of the games of the era, like, if you mash like two buttons at the same time, you get sort of like a power move that drains your life but like knocks everyone away from you and in this case like they do kind of

like a sweep on the ground which just knocks people away but to me what makes me memorable in my head is that they make this ridiculous like it is really bad yeah it's an inhuman an inhuman whale the first time I heard it I'm like is this is this coming from a real person but yeah and a lot of the enemies are just I mean again I don't I've not read that many Punisher comic books, so I don't know how many these characters are from anything, or if they're just, like, a bunch of weird ideas. Like, there's, like, there's, like, robots with, like, human faces on them

and, like, a bunch of, like, just weirdos. And I feel like it's, in general, it's just kind of, like, what's going on here, game? But it's, like, it's all grounded by the fact that the Punisher's there, and you know what the Punisher's all about. He's there. He's going to shoot things, and I'm sure you get grenades. You can throw grenades of people, like, yeah.

Yep. It took me a while to figure out that to throw a grenade. You had to jump, and then, to a special attack, which you do have a limited supply of those. They're like your screen clearing bombs, and when you drop one, everyone screams, which is also fair. But, you know, it's a really fun game for this period to play, for me anyway, because the Punisher just, like, he moves so fluidly, and he can just roll and, like,

attack, dash around the screen in such a way that I don't feel like a lot of fighting game or rather brawlers of that period really let you do at least not too many of them that I played so it doesn't feel very stiff for the genre which I think is important especially in 1993 yeah I remember like they've got like like a dash going on and I feel like in my head I can picture the Punisher Sprite like there's some sort of a dash into a kick and it looks like almost like do you kick like he's like it's a straight kick like straight out that can really like it's got some distance to it I'm gesturing with my my leg my arm here folks on camera because I can't kick because they'll kick the desk.

But, like, he's got some rage punisher, like, even without the guns. This was, like, a really creative period for Capcom. We're like, all right, we figured out a few of these genres. Like, we landed on something with Final Fight. We landed on something with Street Fighter 2. Like, how can we, now that we've set the template for some of these things, how can we really expand them? And, you know, I think the end game for that is what they did with the D&D games,

the brawling D&D games. But, like, yeah, Kevin, what you were saying with Punisher's mobility, how he moves around the screen. I think that is what their way of sort of experimenting with this genre that they essentially locked down with Final Fight. And, you know, it was around this time, too, that we're not long after this, that Dark Stockers is coming out. The first Dark Stockers game, the game that Akimoto made after Punisher was Aliens versus Predator. So they were also sort of leaning into different ways that they could use, especially firearms. and things in brawlers. So this was a cool, like, let's say not quite golden period,

but it was a cool period for Capcom where they were really kind of like pushing against boundaries that they themselves had said. And I love that everything that in other brawlers, you would just like punch a few times to get an item out of or a bonus point thing. Those are just weapons in this. Like the Punisher will pick up a barrel or a desk

or like a street light, just the weirdest stuff, and he'll swing it on people. And, you know, you pick up the weapons, and because it's the Punisher game, you know, you have, like, buoy knives, you have axes, katanas, just all sorts of stuff. And you get that nice juicy Capcom, like, slashing sound effect that, you know, like Vega has in Street Fighter.

This is really, like, New York in the 70s, there's just knives all over the ground. and, you know, machetes in random garbage cans. Tough streets. Real warrior stuff, yeah. I think John, though, if you look at the examples you gave John, I think you can sort of touch on what's happening there because really as Capcom's, I think,

betting more on fighting games than, you know, beat-em-ups. The beat-ups they do make are almost all, like, branded with some of their company's characters. So it's like, you know, you've got the Punisher, you've got D&D, you've got E&D, you've got Alien versus Predator, like, these are all games that are, you know, it's their artwork. It's a lot of, you know, their formula, their know-how, but all the characters are from other companies, and that's what they're banking on drawing people towards the machine.

Like, oh, look, here's, you know, here's the aliens and the predator, and you can, you can be a predator or you can be a weird Schwarzenegger, you know, like, and let's just, you know, let's just kill a bunch of aliens, let's just do it, you know? And that's one of the reasons you never see these anymore. They almost never get re-released because the rights to these are just a mess. Alien versus Predator is a prime example of this. It was on that weird Capcom, like the arcade stick deal.

All of us are holding our hands up and like very wide out. But like the thing that we never got in the U.S., I think it's only a UK thing, which again, that's probably part of the rights issues with aliens versus predator, which is a shame. That game kicks ass. It's really good. Cadillacs and dinosaurs, an okay brawler,

but also the license from a very small American comic book. but the rights for that are all over the place. And, yeah, it's a shame because, like, these games are very cool. But if they ever get officially re-released, you have to gobble them up quickly because it's not going to last. I'm shocked the D&D games are still available on Xbox. Yeah. Like, of all things.

And they're backwards compatible. That's like, yeah, here we go. I'm just going to apparently keep these on the store forever. Those were super rare on the Japanese Saturn. And that's a place where, like, nothing is rare. So get them. Buy those games. They're super good.

Well, let's advance the calendar one year to 1994. A big year for Capcom in general. As John Ray mentioned, Darkstar came out that summer, among many other games that Capcom put out in 1984. Ninety-four is also the year of the, you know, last, quote-unquote, revision of Street Fighter 2. So there's a lot happening in arcades and has a lot of choices for Capcom. At the very end of the year, though, we get X-Men, Children of the Adam. And that is, I would say, the first salvo in what we expect when we talk about Capcom Marvel games, because this is indeed a 2D fighting game with comic book characters.

And they went big. They went big right away. You know, like, I would say the Punisher, you know, it's not divorced from the Punisher property. But like, if you took the Punisher out of the Punisher video game and put in two other guys, you know, like, you wouldn't have to change that much to make it just a just a general. general brawler about, you know, beating people up and just having fun. But, like, this is a superhero game and all the character superheroes, and they know this, and they made it with that in mind, and I think it's, it really reflects a lot of what's happening

in the game, in the presentation, in the, in the animation, all of it. And I think it's, it's probably a reason why, you know, I remember just being drawn to it right away, you know, seeing it as like, oh, oh, cool, X-Men fighting games, like, oh, wait, oh, this is rad. Oh, wow. Oh, wow, this isn't just, like, Street Fighter with X-Men, you know, and by the time this comes out, like, my mind had already been blown by Dark Suckers, but, like, this isn't even like Dark Suckers. This is a whole other thing from Dark Suckers, even. They're really going in a new direction, even if it's building on what they know from Street Fighter, but it's totally off the wall or off the ground, off the ceiling.

I mean, yeah. Off of everything, really. Yes. You have, this is a game. You're moving around a lot, you know, because these are a bunch of superheroes. And I think, as you noted in the the notes here. Who was it that said it from Capcom? Or no, it was Alex Jimenez, that's right. Yeah, he said that these aren't martial artists. These are superheroes. So they should be able to go, you know, higher, faster, half of them fly.

So sure enough, this is the game where you've got super jumps, where you're just leaping far off into the, you know, ether at this point. You've got, like, a lot of dashes. You've got the chain combos from Darkstalkers. which also, it just fits so well in this game. I feel like of all the games in this genre that came out in 94, this is the one that feels the most current. And I think that's because a lot of modern games really pulled from the Marvel Capcom series.

And this one's not quite there yet, but it's close. Like, it plays sort of like a half step between like Street Fighter and Darkstalkers and Marvel. Well, I mean, this is basically the beginning of, we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but what we now consider the anime fighting game, like air dashing, crazy mobility, screen-filling super attacks,

like nutty combos that go into like the dozens of hits, dozens plural of hits, whereas, like, a good example of this is that the Silver Samurai has a projectile where he throws a giant shuriken, right? And that hits six times. If you get a six-hit combo in any Street Fighter 2,

you are a very good Street Fighter 2 player. Like, it's not common to get that many hits in a combo, at least at that point in these, in fighting games, right? So, like, yeah, it was built to be lots of stuff thrown at you all the time. And I love it. I love this game dearly. It's, I think it's kind of busted. I mean, these all are. Yeah, it's totally right.

But, like, the roster is small, but it is absolutely beautiful. And, I mean, like, if you're in a, in a fighting game. You're into video games. At this point, you're like, man, I would love a Street Fighter 2 with these characters. And look, here it is. Here is a Street Fighter 2 with X-Men. And they all look really good. Like, I gushed over this game.

I love it so much. Yeah, the lineup is interesting me because they've sort of got a loose idea of, like, heroes and villains. And, like, on the character select screen, like, everyone's sort of standing there, and they're, like, facing off against one another, which is kind of neat. I'll just run down the lineup real fast. You've got Storm, Cyclops, Wolverine, Iceman, Colossus, Silo. It's all on the hero side. And as far as villains go, you've got Omega Red, Silver Samurai, Sentinel, and Spiral.

And then, of course, if you play through one-player mode and you get to the boss levels, you've got a juggernaut, who's like sort of the first boss. And then the last boss, of course, is Magneto, because who else is going to be? And in the arcade game, I don't think you can actually play them. But in home ports, they get. playable via codes or shenanigans if you want to. But in the vanilla, at least arcade release, you can't play those characters. You only fight them as sort of boss characters. And they are appropriately oversized. Juggernaut, I think this is the first game that has this, like,

Juggerna has what's called Super Armor in that if he's attacking you and you hit him, you might do some damage, but he won't flinch from one hit. So one of his standard moves is he just sort of slides forward and punches into the ground. And it does a lot of damage. So you might think, oh, well, I'll just punch him before he hits me. It's like, well, you can do that by all means, but that's not going to stop him from punching you in the face. So it's a trade. You have to decide what trades you want to make with the juggernaut, or if he, or if to figure out a way to hit him multiple times and that will sort of interrupt his moves. But like just one hit, no, no, he keeps coming. That's, that's his

whole thing, the juggernaut. He keeps coming. The villain lineup for this is really interesting because, you know, Omega Red factored into the TV series, which this game definitely pulls from a fair bit. Yes. And Sentinel, like, Sentinel does not look anything like a Sentinel in terms of the color scheme. I don't know how they came up with that one, to be entirely honest. It's Japanese joint. You know, these guys are, they're into, like, Akiman used to be a Gundam animator.

I will say, like, Sentinel looks gorgeous. Yeah. I heard somewhere, like, a long time ago, that he was made up of multiple sprites in this game, and I don't know if that's true, but he sure looks like it, because the way all the different components move when he's, like, doing anything is so cool. I mean, when the match starts, like, his pieces sort of, like, come together. Yeah, it's awesome.

And a lot of his limbs, like, sort of, like, open and close and, like, shoot out little, like, I don't know if it's steam or gas, but, like, he's sort of, like, he's always, like, emitting little things, and, like, a lot of his moves involve summoning small robots under the screen, and one of his big moves, like, he opens up his body and, like, sort of charges a giant projectile and then fires it forward, but, like, he doesn't just, like, you know, move his hands. Like, he, like, he literally opens all his body parts up, and, like, so, like, his face is open and his arms are open. Like, he, like, he, like, almost unfolds to release, like, a bunch of, like, energy beams, and it's, like, it's a lot of, it's very visually impressive.

He's also, he's even tall. Like, the Juggernaut, of course, is a really big sprite in this game, but Sentinel is, like, a little bit taller than him. Like, he's not, like, he's not, like, like as wide, but he's like taller, which is just fun to look at, and it's fun to play, and he's got like a weird voice, too. It's delightful. Yeah. I guess he was, go ahead, sorry. I was just going to add that if you've

only ever seen these characters sprites in the later games, especially Marvel 2, you owe it to yourself to see what they did with them in this game, because they just have so much more animation. Well, it's, in Marvel 2 is such a faster game, and it's not that Children of the Atom

is necessarily slow, but it does move at a different pace. So you get, you get more of the opportunity to sort of like drink in some of these animations. Like, um, Silox, idle animation, like, she just looks so angry. And she's like, you know, there's the normal sort of Ryu and Ken kind of bounce back and forth kind of thing, boxers bounce. But like, you know, she like shakes. It's awesome. And, um, Sentinel, like, when he moves on the ground, the ground crumbles a little bit because he's like moving so slowly and he's a giant robot so he's so heavy it's the attention to detail in this game is really remarkable like marvel i'm sure was involved like like the american side of marvel was

probably watchdog and some of the things that they were doing but like akimoto was on the sideline saying like no sidelock looks japanese but she should have a british accent um wolverine should be short and not just short this short like you know like stack them up against each other like he was he was basically telling the rest of the development team like i'm a nerd about this stuff and we're going to do it right and so when they went back to the american side of capcom they're like you guys have figured it out do it cool and then i guess they got into some fights with the the marvel licensing side but like again marvel was not really in a position to really put up with a lot at that point because you know they were they wanted they wanted the relationship to be good

to ultimately move on to other stuff but like they weren't really doing a lot of pushback but i guess they did with Sentinel because in the comics, Sentinels are like two stories tall. In this video game, they're like maybe eight or nine feet tall kind of thing, right? So I guess that was one of the big arguments. And I keep bringing Akimoto back up because like, and you should all check this out if you get a chance.

He is a translator for Western comics and books and stuff like that. And he has since left Capcom. But he did in 2020 this gigantic hundreds of tweets long thread on Twitter hundreds for that. Yeah. And he's like, let's just talk about comics that I'm into. Let's just talk about models that I'm into. Here's all the stuff that they did while I was at

Capcom and some of the funny stories. And so like a lot of the information that we're pulling from him is from this Twitter thread. But I guess, yeah, he was the guy that would go to Marvel and be like, no, here's a precedent in this one issue of X-Men in like the late 70s where Arcade is

fighting the X-Men. He made these small sentinels and they're like, fine, whatever. Just leave us alone. Sparrow was a weird choice, too, because, like, she does show up in the comics and in the TV show, but she's kind of a minor character in a lot of those. instances. But here, like, she's clearly here for the animators to flex. Because, you know, she's got six arms and they're constantly moving. Even in her idle animation, all of her, like, moves involve her using them in different ways. I think my favorite is when she, like,

bunches them up into a giant fist and just hits you with her arms. But she's interesting. Silver Samurai was a weird choice, but... Yeah, talk about a weird minor character. Well, all of these guys showed up in the first year or two of the Jim Lee X-Men book. So, like, Jim Lee went 12 issues with it. And then Chris Claremont left after issue three. And this game is loosely based on those first three issues, even though Omega Red didn't show up until a few issues later, Silver Samurai spiral, didn't, weren't in them at all. But, like, in later in that run, which is what they were pulling from, these characters did pop in. And it's cool. Like, on the character select screen, you're seeing, like, basically redrawn comic book panels from all

these American artists as the character select, like, the portraits on the character select screen. So if you were, like, a nerd about this stuff in the early 90s, you can be like, oh, that's a, that's an art diver, that's an Andy Cooper, that's a Jim Lee. You could kind of, like, pick these things out, but, like, the actual, and I, maybe that was Marvel's way of kind of doing these things to, like, look, you know, make this American enough, but, like, the animation of the sprites is way Japanese, and it is, they are absolutely beautiful. Yeah. When we talk about the animation, though, I also want to highlight something that I believe starts in this game, at least versus compared to other Capcom games, is that when characters sort of swing their limbs, or especially if they get hit, you have these incredible sort of like smear frames. And not just like, you know, like if they're attacking them, maybe, yeah, you got like you got like a fist moving, like a little bit of a smear like where their arm is sort of as a blur. But if they get hit, sometimes their entire body just becomes these big sort of splotches of color. Um, which I think only becomes more exaggerated as the, as the series goes on.

But like, even here in X-Men, I think you really, if you go through and like, look at, like, say, like, a, a Mugan rip of one of these characters and you see, like, all the sprites, like, laid out one by one, like, some of their, some of their individual animations, like, just look great, they're almost unrecognizable. They just like just like a, just like a splat on a windshield almost, just with the right colors in place, you know, which is, you know, a drastic change in like Street Fighter 2 or even like Darkstalkers was like those, all those frames and those games are recognizably like the characters, you know, they'll make faces, they'll get burned, but like it's always like, oh, the character is doing this thing. They're throwing up now, okay? But in this game, no, if they get hit, they might just become a weird squiggly thing for a frame or two. And it just, and it all, it all just helps the kinetic feel of how this game looks and how it moves. It's really impressive. Darkstalkers did it too, but maybe to a lesser extent. Like, if you look at Sprite sheets from Morgan, you can see a lot of that stuff, but

it's, yeah, not to the degree that it is in the superhero end of things. And that did eventually bleed out into other Capcom stuff. Like, Makoto's Sprite sheet in Third Strike is just a mess of smear animations compared to like Ryu, which is not. And so like, they

started, I think, thinking about these things on like maybe a character by character basis, but I don't know, I don't know if that's true. But yeah, there's a lot of that in this. But that just your mind makes up what your eye doesn't actually see, right? So that's what Smear animation basically is. So that's like if something is, if you're seeing like a head turn all the way around because they were hit, you're not seeing like every inch of a head turning all the way around. It's just like a white of color.

And your mind kind of like connects the dots for you. So it is fun to see these things in. slow motion and kind of wonder how they got sometimes from like point A to point Z within like an animation cycle. Yeah. Sorry. That's a weird butt in diamond. Yeah.

And I guess you also marked in here about some of the characters that didn't show up that do show up in later games. So I guess eventually, you know, Alex Jimenez was talking about this from the Capcom U.S. side. He was saying that he wanted that Gambit and they wouldn't put him in because Gambit is a crook, which is really, really funny way to describe him.

It's not wrong. Right. And they didn't want to use Rogue because her powers would have been too difficult, which is really funny because since two games down the line, they do put Rogue in, and she does use her powers in an really interesting way. But they did also throw in Akuma as a hidden character back before, you know, he even had his own name or, you know, character portrait. Because this was, like, mere months after they first brought him in in a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

And he does play a lot alike. Like, he does have the chains and everything from this game. And he does have some other weird things that doesn't really show up again with, like a counter. That's his... Because this game, you can spend your super meter, your X meter on buffs. So some characters, like Colossus gets hot. Hyper armor, and suddenly, you know, he's made of steel. So every, uh, every hit, he just walks right through it.

Uh, slylock, she makes a bunch of clones of herself that don't really do anything, but ostensibly, have there to confuse yourself. Akuma, he just does a little counter pose. And if you hit him, he does a super uppercut. He parries. Yeah, he, it's, it's the first parry, I guess, in a street fighter game. Uh-huh. Um, that's twice I got to mention third strike in this point.

and it's not going to stop. Oh, no. But he does have, like, double fireballs like Boss Akuma does in Street Fighter, too. He's just kind of a dick. He is playable in the arcade version, just like in Street Fighter. You put in a, like, a little code on the character select. You get to use him. And he's completely busted, though not for reasons you'd expect, apparently.

He just has some blockstring infinites that no one else does. If not for those, he would be perfectly fair because everyone in this game is insane. Yeah. But this game plays in a much different way. I mean, we keep coming back to this, but like, even on like the fundamental button level, this game plays differently than the average fighting game. It's not like you've got three punches and three kicks and then you can jump kick and whatever. It's like Cyclops has two punches.

One of them is a launcher. His hard punch is a projectile. It's just, you know, you don't have to do a motion. It's just a one-hit firewall, basically. Sentinel has just a mess of projectiles and standing moves and stuff like that. A lot of them are like stick dependent, so hopefully pushing forward on the stick or backward on the stick or neutral. There's a ton of normal moves in this game, and they're all not kind of martial arts stuff, which I think is part of the appeal, too, is that like if you're coming from a street fighter or even a samurai showdown or something like that, you're not, you can tell. right away that this is a different kind of game.

You can play a really easy projectile game if you just stand there and match the hard punch button with Cyclops. You can get in and do chain combos, which we've mentioned before, but that's where you basically just type on the button pad from light punch to hard punch, and you'll just get a free combo out of that. You don't have to like time the hits.

You can just chain them all together. Wolverine was just made basically for that purpose, and it's just getting in and harassing people And so it, and I, the reasoning I think is because, like, because Street Fighter 2 was becoming so hardcore and other fighting games were sort of like more lending to that tip than for like newer players, they, they wanted a game, especially if it's going to be a license game, especially from a license that's very popular at the time. They wanted to attract a bunch of people that just probably wouldn't give a crap about fighting games. They just want to hit buttons and have fun. And so all of the buttons do crazy amounts of weird. stuff, but they also, with the addition of the super jumps, kind of ushered in this era of crazy

air combos and eventually the enemy fighting game style where like, you're popping guys into the air, you jump up in the air after them, and then you slam a bunch of buttons, you hit them back into the ground, and hopefully you can pop them back into the air. And the later Capcom versus games, with some exception, are essentially built around this purpose primarily. And that all started with this. And all kinds of stuff will pop people into the air. Like Cyclops, I

loved playing Cyclops in this game because he's got two throws. One of them, he just throws a guy into the air and he shoots an optic blast at them to keep them there. And then as they're falling, you can juggle him with a super. Or he's got another throw that body slams and the bounce of the body slam is a launcher. You can hit him with like a six hit

uppercut after that. Like, if you're a creative player, you can do all kinds of wacky, fun stuff in this game. If you're not a creative player, you're just punching guys all over the map. It's a ton of fun to just slam buttons in this game. Yeah, we should also mention some of the weird aspects of this game, especially the meter, because yes, you have the meter and it you can, you can use it for buffs or you can save it all up and do a big attack, you know, but you can also like you spend meter to like do like tech. hits, which is kind of a little weird. So you can use it to get out of throws, but you can't get out of too many throws,

otherwise you'll run out, like, you'll run out. And yeah, you'll find situations where, like, two players are up against each other, and it's just throw, counterthrow, throw, throw, and they're just burning all of their meter in that one interaction. And then it's essentially starting the roundover because, like, neither of them have meter anymore. Yeah. This is a weird time in Capcom, too, in that, like, they didn't really know what to do

with Supermeter. This is their experiment with like, all right, all these other fighting games had had super special moves and a super meter at the bottom of the screen and stuff like that. Fine. We finally put one into Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. And then this is the next big fighting game. Well, Darkstalkers was before this and like they were using burning meter for X moves, which is now a common thing. But like, what do we do with meter in a superhero game? Like you burn it to like Cyclops has a scissor kick throw that he can only do by, by, by.

spending meter. Colossus with the armor and all that stuff. Teching throws, using it for a super move. This was their way of like, all right, let's play with this concept a little bit. This went away immediately after this. But like this was them sort of, again, screwing around, pushing back against, you know, the frame that they had set in these games. Kinds of games. Another thing I wanted to highlight is fact that, you know, as you mentioned, John, a lot of characters just have projectiles they can just do. as regular attacks. But the characters that do have projectiles,

a lot of them have sort of, um, like directional aspects to them. Like, Cyclops can shoot opposite beam straight ahead or he can shoot one like up at an angle, which is very useful in a game where you got very tall jumping. Uh, I know Iceman has got a lot of projectiles that can go in different directions.

Um, Silver Samarite, you can literally just move his, his giant shudric and just hold the joystick. He can just slide it up and down. Uh, that was my move all the time. I would throw the chudiken and I'd get people in the feet. And like,

If they weren't blocking low, they could get them the feet, like, ha, you didn't, you didn't block my giant shitty kid. The original, you know. Yes. Yeah, it's a cool game in the, yeah, this game is just, it's got a lot of weird details to it. It's got a very interesting pace. There are still crazies out there that play this at, like, super high level on Fightcade. And watching those matches is just, it's not as nuts as watching like Marvel 2 or Marvel 3 where like half the time I can't keep track. of what the hell is going on.

And I think the players have to time, don't even know. But, like, with this, you can at least see what's happening, even though what's happening is very fast. And it's a lot of dashing in. It's a lot of, like, there's not a lot of, like, jump dashes in this game. Some characters can do it, but not everybody. It's not a common thing. But, like, the ground game is really interesting at high level in this, in that, like,

the Cyclopses of the world is kind of run in and, like, dash cancel light attacks and into each other to basically like tackle somebody into a corner and then there's the Omega Reds that like get in and do these these kinds of things and eventually what they want is to basically throw somebody in the air with the tentacle and do a soup around them kind of that it's it's easier to parse I guess of what I'm getting at um at high level play if you're just interested in watching some of this than some of the later games in the series but it does things if you're used to that kind of thing if like you are a marble three Marvel, Tatanooga versus Capcom fan kind of thing.

It's going to look like it's still a different game, but the DNA is kind of there. Yeah, it was pretty influential on the series, which is interesting because it didn't really get around that much. It tanked in Japan. I didn't see it very often in the U.S. either, which I know it's the same is true for Street Fighter 2, Super Turbo. I did not see any copies of that until like 2008. Same. So this was this period where the fighting game boom was still happening, but I don't know, I think

operators were a little wary of, you know, Capcom's CPS2 projects at this point after Super Street Fighter 2 tanked so hard. It did get ported. It was on Saturn worldwide. If I remember a claim is the company that brought it in the U.S. I have a copy on the shelf behind me somewhere. And then it was also on the PS1 and on DOS in other parts of the world. Not Japan, just Europe, et cetera, which is interesting.

And the home ports, in my experience, they're pretty good. There's a fair bit of cut animation. There's a lot of load times, but because it's not a tag game, like some of the later ones. it's not nearly as bad as it would be with like PS1 Marvel versus Capcom just a little bad I imagine the Saturn port of this is probably

pretty good I've never played any of the ports it's pretty good it's again it's just they cut some animation and it's you're waiting 50 years for the game to load but yeah I think people on the whole they like this game

it got a positive reception among people who did get to play it. Yeah, Americans were into this, but like, in this, again, according to Akimoto, one of the reasons it tanked in Japan is that, like, arcade games with American characters, Western characters just did, by and large, didn't do well in Japan. So by the time this came out, arcade operators were just not buying these kinds of games. So it could have been a bigger hit, but like, like, they were, because there was a sort of a bias there that like, you know, we've, We've had Avengers games before, and we didn't make any money.

We've had the Konami X-Men beat him up in Japan did terrible business kind of thing. So, like, arcade operators were just not buying this game because they didn't think it was going to be a big deal, even though it was coming from Capcom in Capcom's sweet spot. So, yeah, it did, you know, I've seen some conflicting stories of how well it did here in the U.S. Like in the Polygon story that eventually went into Matt Leone's book, Like a Hurricane, Alex Aminez said that, you know, it did pretty well in the U.S. And Marvel was happy with it. According to Aki-Moto, he's like, I don't think it did all that great in the U.S.,

but it did well enough for us to impress people from the player side. All the player feedback was very, very, very positive from like the hardcore and the newbie weirdos alike. but yeah like it started it definitely started something so even if it didn't do great financially it did well enough for things to sort of progress from there honestly and i've definitely seen the follow-up game all over the place i think this one had a much wider reach i didn't i saw children of the atom more often than i saw the the next game we're going to talk oh interesting yeah well before i talk about the next game i just want to highlight one more aspect which i think John, you touched it a couple times, but, like, yeah, Konami's X-Men game was very much

built around the pride of the X-Men pilot that didn't go to series. And one thing that I think that kind of makes that game weird is that when you look at that game, like, the characters are big and very expressive, but, like, a lot of their powers don't really make sense if you actually know where the characters are, you know, like, you know, sure, Cyclops shoots, shoots beams, yes, but, like, Nightcrawler, like, sort of, like, zips around the screen for some reason, like, you know, and Coloss's his famous move. Like, Colossus doesn't do that. Like, he shouldn't be screaming and, yeah, like, making

a giant energy spark. It doesn't make any sense. Whereas this game, you know, probably with a lot of, you know, influence input from Akimoto, like, this game very much relies on actual characters doing actual stuff you would expect them to do. And in a fun twist,

they actually got several actors from the ongoing X-Men cartoon to voice their characters in this game, which apparently was, according to Alex Jimenez, it was a last-minute deal. Apparently, Capcom on the Japanese side had recorded some actors and Marvel heard those actors and said, no, no, this won't work. So I can only imagine what bullet we dodged because in 1994, who knows, who knows what English teachers they found on the streets of most talk. I was like, hey, hey, buddy, you want to be Wolverine?

Right. Yeah, they did bring in, was it, Cal Dodd as Wolverine and Norman Spencer's Cyclops. for the first X-Men fighting game, and they voiced those characters in the 1992 cartoon. So, and Cal Dodds back in the new one for whatever that's worth. Yeah, and as we'll see, as the series goes on, they only get more and more voice actors to get on board, because obviously this was like the first thing.

And then like, oh, this is doing well. Let's get more. Let's get more actors here, more actors here. Yeah, I really like all of the, all of the voice acting for the most part in this game. Like, Wolverine, Cyclops, and Storm, I think are the only ones that consistently showed up in the TV show, if I'm not mistaken.

But, like, they had to find a Russian, a guy to do a convincing Russian accent for Omega Red. They had to do somebody to do a convincing British accent for Siloac. And they all sound to me very, very good. And I, again, like, attention to detail. They were really firing in all cylinders when they made this game. I really love this game a lot. Which brings us to the next year in 1995, and their next year in 1995, and their next game,

Which, according to these interviews we've been reading, by the way, a lot of the stuff we've talked about today, aside from things on Twitter, a lot of this does come from interviews with Polygon that eventually became like a hurricane. But you can go, if you look up oral history of X-Men and stuff, you'll see a lot of these quotes that we're pulling from here. So apparently, they started working on the next game while working on X-Men, which they sort of pictured as a sequel in their minds, but in the end it comes out and it's not really a sequel. basically a brand new game that's building on what came before it. And that game is called Marvel Superheroes. Now, we should also mention that for X-Men, X-Men was directed by, I'm sorry, Akira Nishita who was the planner of Street Fighter 2. Apparently, he had a choice.

They're like, hey, do you want to do the S-Bet game or do you want to Street Fighter 3? And Nish-Tani said, X-Men. So we can imagine how the world might have been different. But after X-Men comes out, Nish-Tani moves on to other pastures. So for the next game, Marvel's Superheroes, it's actually directed by Takeshi Tezica. Not Takashi Tezika. This is not Nintendo. Takeshita, a different guy entirely.

I get that confused all the time. It is a very, those are very, I mean, there's a lot of names that I get confused sometimes, but that's very similar. And what I like about this Marvel Superheroes game is that obviously they have a lot of characters they've already made, so they're going to keep some of them. They're going to keep Wolverine. They're going to keep Cylock. They're going to keep Magneto. They're going to keep Juggernaut. But now they're going to expand.

It's like, oh, now we're just use a bunch of Marvel characters. And when I say a bunch, I mean like a bunch. And they're going, they're going to go a little weird here, okay? I mean, obviously, you got some superstars, like Spider-Man, okay, Hulk, okay, Iron Man, not the popular character he was. He's not the superstar he is today, you know, 25 years ago, but like, people knew Iron Man. You saw him on stuff. Captain America, we don't look Captain America. Boss-wise, you got Dr. Doom, that's a good boss.

But then you have, like, Blackheart, who's, like, Mephisto's son? Like, not, he looks for him of a sister, but he's not Mephisto. He's Blackheart. And then Schumagorath, and I love this story. There's a quote here from Dana Moorhead, who was head of Marvel Creative Services. He says, even our team, which was made up some pretty hardcore geeks, half of them looked at each other and said, who? Is that ours? Is that yours?

Like, even the people who worked at Marvel at the time were like, who is Schumegorath? what do you mean he's this dr strange villain but um yeah a minor dr strange villain yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah this this is a deep deep cut yeah yeah i think i think he showed up in the second dr strange movie right didn't he show for a fight scene like in the beginning of the movie for like five minutes yeah yeah yeah but that was for me i think i think i was watching was like hey it's shimogorah hey and according to uh akimoto it was tezikato it was tezikos that wanted to Mugorath. And even like the Capcom Japan side were like, why?

Like, I feel like it must have been another animation flex. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, honestly, coming off of, of, oh, my God, spiral. I keep forgetting her name, spiral. Come up with spiral and her six arms. So here we got like a tentacle guy who's like six tentacles. And he uses them as like sort of pseudopods and fake limbs.

Like, he's not like a victory pose where like he crosses them like arms. Like he's got like, you know, he's got like, you know, he's got. a giant eye, which is very expressive. He's going to wrap with you. I think it's a great, it's a great choice from like a video game standpoint. It's just, but for like, as a Marvel reader at the time, I remember I was like, I had no idea who Shiburgoreth was. Zero, you know? So like, it's out of left field, but I feel like it has stood the test of time.

It's just like, this is a weird, this is a weird fun character who has a lot of weird fun moves that are like, they look great, they feel great. Um, ostensibly their inspiration for Marvel Superheroes is the, you know, then recent Infinity Gem saga, which of course now today is very well known because of the movies, but, like, at that point, I think you had to, you had to, you had to been reading a lot of comic books to know what the infinite gems were, but they really bake it into the gameplay here in that, in that the gems are in the game. Like, as you're fighting people in the game, you can sort of make gems pop out. Um, if your character has a gem on their person and you get comboed, you might drop that gem and the other player can pick it up.

And then you can activate the gems And each gem has their like a different ability You know like for example I mean some of it's sort of basic stuff like Okay the power gem Okay that means you deal more damage Like yeah yeah great great Time gem makes you move faster

Okay sure this makes sense But other characters like have specific reactions Specific gems which is like Really interesting things You know Shumagorath in particular Schumagorath if he uses the time gem What happens is

Each hit he does Will turn his opponents into stone And what that means is, if you do, I believe, a standing heavy kick, he lashes out with all his tentacles and each hit sort of registers. So he's like, like, turn to stone back, turn to stone back, turn. So he basically loop characters into sort of like lock them down where they can't get out of this combo, essentially because you keep turning them into stone, which, you know, it's hard to pull off. Like, if you pull it off, okay, right, you're doing a lot of damage here. And like, does that make sense? Not exactly.

but it also is just, it's sort of like really clever and fun and creative which I feel like is this game's bread and butter. It's like so much is happening here and it's all like, whoa, what are we doing here? Okay, it's wonderful. Okay, great, you know? I think this is a cool system

that was not baked long enough because, I mean, this is the start of another Capcom kind of like mini legacy of using gems for good and for evil in their fighting games. But they, This game is kind of famously busted at super high level and that like almost unplayable. And I can't, I don't exactly know the reasons why, but the gems are a big part of that. Kevin, you may know more about this than me.

My understanding is pretty much everybody at this game has an infinite combo. Yeah. Which I guess balances it in a different way. That's true. Yeah. So one of the other games we're going to, we're going to talk about later is famously busted for just that reason too. But like it's, I really like. And again, this is sort of.

what I was talking about earlier, that, like, this is the Wild West as far as, like, what do we do with, like, meters? Like, how do we really kind of evolve the concept, so it's not just a big, powerful super move? The gems are kind of a way to play with that, too, but I never felt that it was implemented correctly for whatever reason. I didn't play this game a ton just because of that. I mean, I always liked Hulk with the time gem suddenly having, like, Spider-Man combo speed, old power. So that was always fun. I do also, like, connecting to this whole gem thing, the final boss of this was Thanos, which, again, everyone knows him now. In, you know, 1995, you had to be a comic book nerd to know who Thanos was, because he wasn't in any of the other media that I

can remember. No. And he's such a goofy-looking dude, too. I hate that spright. My God, he's so like doughy and weird it's like he's he's like the pillsberry doughboy and orange it's very strange and spider man looks amazing in this game like spider man is a cool sprite it's awesome they nailed down this sort of like buggy weirdness to him um but he's still like a bipedal human it's it's hard to explain but thanos looks so dumb it's a it's a bit of it aside but uh i had a buggy who, you know, Marvel 2, which we're not going to get into in this particular episode, Thanos is one of the characters in it,

and the way the arcade game worked is all the characters would unlock on a timer. And when he heard Thanos was unlocking, he was so excited. He's like, oh, yeah, that guy was so cool in Marvel superheroes. I can't wait to try out Thanos. And he, like, ran all the way up to the arcade. He tried them out. And Thanos is ass in that game. Yes, he is.

And he's like, oh, oh, no. No, no, no. Well, I mean, to be fair, like, Thanos, even without the infinity gauntlet, it's supposed to be, like, an ultra-powerful character in the comic books, like, you know, all kinds of different, like, strength levels and things like that. Like, we don't have to really get too deep into those things. But, like, how do you balance that against a character like Captain America? So I guess in Marvel, too, I can see the reasoning there.

like yeah they just nerfed him into the ground in oh yeah which is good because he's extremely overpowered in this one because once you start fighting him he takes all the gems for himself because it's what happens in the comic classic capcom last boss move

right there and you even have like that comic backdrop of all the petrified characters in the background because that's what he did in the infinity gauntlet story arc which is why he was fighting Captain America, I guess. Well, this guy's not up to snuff, but here he is.

Sorry, Kev. On the flip side, though, the sub-boss, the second-to-last boss looks great. Dr. Doom is a great sprite in this game. He moves well. His attacks are awesome. They're all like weird. Like we were saying about Sentinel in the last game, they're all like weird projectiles. that you'll do, and he can summon Doom clones, Doom bots to do things for him.

I think he looks like straight out of a cartoon to me in this game. Yeah, Marvel never missed with Dr. Doom. I'll give him that. Yeah. They always gave him all the cool stuff. And he speaks to the third person if you hear this, like, just like in a comic book, it's like, Doom would never do that. Like, he says things like that in the game.

It's hilarious. And then, like, I'd love to know. just what happened here, but there's a hidden character. It's only in the Japanese version, and it's Anita from, like, Vampire Hunter, you know, Darkstalkers, too. And she's kind of buggy, and she's really broken, even for this game. I've heard that she was supposed to be, like, a test character, or I don't know what happened there. I really would like to know.

She's fun if you, like, mess with her. But if I remember, she doesn't really have an ending. and all sorts of weird issues with her if you try playing her through the story mode. As I recall, as I recall, her supermovish, she just summons a whole, like, a slew of dollheads? Like, yes. Yeah, and it does more damage when you block it than if it hits. She should just take it.

Yeah, you should just take it. She's absurd. And, of course, she's Anita. It's like, she's a little tiny girl, so it's really hard to hit her on top of everything else. Right. Yeah, we're talking a Sprite. It's basically like up to your and my shin. If we're standing tall, like, it's impossible to hit sprites like that.

Marvel 2 had the serve bots in them. Like, think of that as an actual character. Yeah. Did not come back in Marvel 2. No. Speaking of endings really quick, though, Aki-Moto wrote the endings to Children of the Adam and this game. And they're pretty wild.

Like, like, Schumagorath getting the infinity gems and what does he do with it? It basically destroys the universe and starts it all over again kind of thing. Like, they're pretty out there. They're really fun. Doesn't someone become like celebrity? It just becomes famous, I think. It's been a once I played this game, but... Oh.

Scylock in the comics had a part-time job as a supermodel, and they wrote that into the ending of Children of the Adam. Okay. Interesting. But Aki-Moto is into this stuff, guys. Like, he just knows. Yeah, I can't say I'm that familiar with this particular. Marvel comic period.

I'll just take his word for it. As far as who made the cut, we ran everyone who made the cup. We should also highlight the fact that Alex Jimenez, who was on the U.S. Capcom side, he says that he was trying to get characters in there, like the thing and Thor. And for some reason, he couldn't convince people

to put them in the game. Those were two characters he pushed for very audibly. And I guess the Japan side's like, eh, no, we don't want that. Which I can understand. stand in the sense like, okay, if you've got the Hulk, and the Hulk is just a big muscle man, and you've got the juggernaut, who is an even bigger muscle man, maybe you don't want to have another muscle guy in there who's

just all about big, big in muscles, but, like, so then you want to have like a Shumogorath who's a weird tentacle thing, but as far as name recognition go, I would say more, way more people playing arcade games at the point would know the thing or Thor than they would know, you know, uh, Blackheart. Yeah, I feel like the thing must have also been like an animation issue because he's got all the little like rock cracks on him and that must that would have been hell to animate um i do like that they brought back the juggernaut uh like you mentioned earlier and now he's got his cartoon voice uh rick bennett came in so they replaced the actor

from children of the atom uh and they kept him for the rest of these games that he shows up in and it's it's nice to have right sounding juggernaut as someone who liked playing juggernaut Oh, yeah. I love playing during knock because, like, he's so big. And because of the super armor, like, if I just jump in and try and just hit you, like, I'll probably get, I'll probably do some damage. You know, it's a, it's usually a good trade, you know, unless you know what you're doing, which case you'll annihilate me. But, you know, if you don't know what you're doing, then I'll, I'll win the trade. Yeah. Yeah, I get the sense this is probably the most popular game of all of these today. It's definitely the one I see people talk about the most or, like, run weird style. brackets for. So I think it just has that appeal to it for probably because it's so busted. Exactly. I think there's a weird factor to this game that's not in Children of the Atom that I think people really glommed on to over time. I've always felt that this game was a little unfinished to me, but I also don't want to take fun away from people. If you're into the weird side of weird fighting games, this one is weird as fuck. Enjoy.

it. And it was on the Saturn and PS1. The Saturn version uses the, the RAM expansion, I think, like the 1 Meg version, if I remembering right. So it does have more of the animations. Like, they didn't have to cut as much as they did. Yeah, it probably runs pretty well. Yeah.

And then the PS1 version does not have that available to it. So it's a PS1 fighting game. There was also Marvel Superheroes War of the Gems on the Super Nintendo, which I don't think we're really delving into a whole lot here. It's a, it's like a platform brawler sort of game. It doesn't really have anything in common with these other than the fact the character select screen for whatever reason uses the sprites from this. They don't use those sprites in-game, like when you're actually running around

fighting, but they're right there. They're like, all right, we need some good zoomed-in art for these characters. Why don't we just use these? It's a weird game. It is a weird game. And like, you're right, it's tough to kind of explain because it is a platform brawler, not a beat-em-up, but it plays sort of like a beat-em-up. Like, if you kind of imagine at the end point of Mega Man X where he gets a fireball and he can get a, like, a show where you can in some of the other games, like, that's kind of this game all the time. It's very, it's cool, but it's kind of strange.

I'm pretty sure they put it on that arcade one-up Marvel unit they put out a few years. ago for whatever reason. They're like, uh, you know, we've got the Marvel Capcom license. Just toss it in. Put it on there. Yeah. More games are better, I would say. More games are better. Well, let's advance the calendar one more year again.

1996. And this is where I think things start to get very interesting because now Capcom's like, okay, okay, we've got a bunch of characters here. And hey, people like our alpha games. So let's mix, let's put peanut butter and chocolate together and let's have X-Men versus Street Fighter. And I can honestly say, I, you know, the attract screen, where Cyclops and do you shake hands, that, that to me is like, that's an amazing moment, like, from my, from my life. Just like, oh, my God. They're shaking. This is it. This is the starting point, really. Yeah. And it's just, it's real great because you, you've already got these, you know, sort of anime-friendly alpha characters who are, you know, recognizable, but they're also like they're very cartoon-friendly. And it's like, okay, well, they have these characters who are also cartoon-friendly, of course,

and now we're just mashing them together. So the lineup here is mostly existing characters. That's a couple new ones. So I'll run down the lineup real fast here. So we've got Magneto, Juggernaut, Storm, Cyclops, Wolverine, do you, Ken, Charlie Nash, I forget which one it is in America or Japan, but that guy, the guyless friend, Chunli, Zangiev, Dalsim, M. Bison. And as far as new sprites go, we've got Cammy, who is not an alpha before this, and obviously they put her an alpha later. Rogue, they do get a round of Rogue. They have Rogue, and she does her rogue stuff. Gambit, Gambits, I guess he's a thief, but he's okay now. He's been rehabilitated. Yeah. And Sabre Tooth, because Wolverine,

Sabretooth. I think Chunlee, I think they did, I know they had, because this is her and her classic Street Fighter 2 costume, and I know in the Alpha games they had her in her like... The track suit. The track suit. And I know you could pick her as like a hidden character, classic Chunley and Alpha 2.

I don't remember if that came out before or after this, but this does have her and her, like, classic outfit, which is neat. I mean, I think you can... Alpha 2 is 96, so same year, I would say. Yeah. I think you can switch sprites in this game. Or maybe it's the next game.

But, like, I know in one of these, like, both chuns are in the game. They play the exact same way. But, like, they basically did a whole second sprite set for her other outfit. Yeah. Because, you know, it's Capcom. I know where their bread's buttered. Yeah. Priorities.

Priorities, okay? It's Chunle. This game has Akuma in it as a, quote, hidden character. But if you just keep pushing up on the character, select these there, there's no special code or anything. Yeah. Which is fine. Like, yeah, like, just give it to him.

But, um, and he's pretty balanced in this game for a game that is wildly unbalanced. But, um, yeah, right. Um, but all the, um, the promotion art for this has a kuma with like, um, just jacked, ripped, ripped open, um, karate ghee. Like, he's shirtless and just screaming all the time. Yes. And I'm like, hell yeah, I want to play an akuma like that. That is not the akuma in this game. He's just, you know, regular alpha akum.

pure evil, I guess, whatever. And for the last boss, you get Apocalypse, which is really fun. Coming at you with a drill, among other things. The giant screen-filling boss. This is the first, yeah, this is the first, I think, Capcom fighting game where they did the screen-filling boss gimmick. Which they do for all of the other Marvel versus games after this point, I'm pretty sure. I didn't really play Infinite, but everything up for three.

Absolutely. This is the birth of that trend because, yeah, X-Men just had Magneto. Magneto certainly was powerful and had a big shield thing, but like he's basically Magneto, and Phanos is not necessarily that big. He just has big moves. But now you have Apocalypse who, you know, he starts to fight as like, you know, apocalypse with regular limbs. But then he did vanishes and comes back on screen, and it's just this massive sprite that slowly moves back and forth and can change and sort of attack. And yeah, you sort of have. to whittle down his health, you know, through selective, like, you get your hits in when you can, because he can't really block. But if he's attacking, you have to either get out of the way or block, otherwise you're going to be in big trouble. Um, because all his moves are crazy. He's got satellites. He's got drills. He's got lasers. Um, it's, it's a lot. You have to, you have to, you have to really plan your apocalypse fight very carefully. I'd like to circle back to Magneto and Children of the Adam. And he is total bullshit. Like, it is, it's, Like, I don't mean to keep harping on this, that one game.

But, like, he is unique amongst these bosses and that, like, he'll block almost everything. All of his moves do chip damage. And his meter is constantly filling even if he's just standing there. So eventually he's going to unleash his super, which the chip damage is like 20% of your health anyway. If you get hit with it, it's like 50%. Magneto is total bologna in that game. So when they put him into these other games, they really, had to wimp him down.

And again, this game is like totally broken. Everyone's got infinite. Everyone has infinite combos in this game. But like, it's great. Yeah, it is great. In that respect, it's awesome. But like, Magneto is still powerful, but like, they really, they really hit him with

the nerve stick in these games. He got reined in a bit. And, you know, the street fighter characters, now that they're fighting against all these goofy Marvel characters with screen-filling beams and weather effects and whatnot. They are, they're also powered up a fair bit.

So, like, you now have Ryu with his beam Hudoken. Chun Li's kick super has her flying across the screen and her puff ball is now massive. Zankeef's Final Atomic Buster is now the Super Final Atomic Buster. And he just, like, is leaping 40 feet in the air multiple times. Yeah, explosion. Explosion on impact. Explosions on impact. And Bison actually kind of works out here, because he was already super cartoony in the alpha games. They just sort of leaned into it.

Yeah. Yeah, I like his psycho, the other, the kick one. Because in this game, he, like, summons more, like, doubles, and they all sort of fly across the screen doing, like, kicks. This is your kick thing. Yeah, it's funny. I like that version. I like Dalsam's yoga flame is now just, like, a full-screen effect. And because, you know, rogue can just, because she's rogue, she has a move where she gets to steal someone's powers, which is to say she gets one of their special moves.

And she gets that from Dalsam, probably because they can just use, like, the same sprite they use for other things because that's all of her stuff. And it's just extremely funny watching her breathing a giant wall of flame. She gets a shun-goku-satsu from Akuma. She gets the hell murder from Akuma. And it's awesome watching Rogue do it. it. I've never seen that. I've only ever seen her, like, doing the, uh, like the fireballs or, or what have you. That's cool. In Japan, when they, they tried to market this game, they, they leaned into Rogue pretty hard. Like, um, in Japan, for most Capcom arcade games of this era,

not all of them, but they, they made these little, like, 12-page pamphlets called the Secret files that they would give to arcade operators, and arcade operators could decide how to, you know, how to use them if they wanted to use them as prizes for tournaments or whatever. But they're really awesome. And most of them have like interviews with like short interviews with staff and funny anecdotes and things like that. But a lot of them have a couple pages of like animation, production art and stuff like that. And like for this game in particular, it's almost all rogue. Because they were may not only like, again, they know where their bread and butter was, but like they were trying to sort of grapple with a character that does steal powers and how she could

like effectively use them and who she steals from and what those powers. are. So it's pretty neat to flip through that and see. You can find scans of these on the internet pretty easily if you look hard enough for them. Yeah, and they because it's X-Men, they got some more X-Men TV cast members like Lenor Zan

plays rogue once more before she went to parliament. And Tony Daniels is Gambit and Don Franks is Sabretooth. So it's just an extra bit of authenticity, which is funny because I think this is where Sabretooth

can summon Birdie to help him out, which is another, like, extremely deep cut, who I'm pretty sure never shows up in the comics, or not in the TV show. Not in the TV show that I know of, yeah. Yeah, but she's like in a few of the comics, and they're like, yeah, you know what, put Sabretooth's buddy from that one issue in here. She'll fire a gun at him. Well, we should really touch upon the elephant in the room here. The major innovation for this time around is that, in fact, you are in fact choosing two characters.

So everything up to this point has been a one-on-one fighting game, but now we're basically doing two-on-two. And when you pick your two characters, you can switch between them at any time. And when your characters switch in and out, they come in, and they're leaping in and they're attacking. Which means you can sort of like, as you jump in, you can basically hit them as you come in. You can combo. That can be part of your combo. If you're getting caught in the corner, you're getting beaten up, you can sort of like do a, like an alpha combo, basically, where you tag out and tag in your, your buddy, and that costs some meter, but that gets you out of, you know, maybe some chip damage

and they'll maybe hit them out when they come in. And this also works in the super moves, because you can, if you have enough meter, you can have both characters jump on the screen, and they can both do a super at the same time. Now, the gimmick here, though, is that because they're sort of all, like, it's predetermined, some characters work well together and some characters do not, you know, if both characters leap on the screen and both launch a giant, like, laser beam, then you will do a lot of damage. But if, say, one, like, if Zengue, like, grabs them and does a big super throw and then someone else is sitting there throwing a laser beam, they're not going to hit

anything, and you just, you just, it's wasted. So you have to really plan ahead these more sort of moves and figure out which combos work well together and which just are not worth it. And just, you know, they're worth it as two characters, but don't try and use them the same time. It just, it won't pay off. Here's that meter for something else. Yeah.

I did think it's interesting that, I think this is, well, this is, well, this is one of the first two games that had tag mechanics in the fighting game genre. The other one is Kazuna Encounter by S&K, which if I remember, right, came out the exact same month. Wow. And it's kind of interesting to see how, you know, they each approached the whole tag mechanics. Because like, yeah, this game, you tag any time you want. And that game, you have to get to your corner and then you can tag out. I think this is the version of tag play that, you know, sort of stuck around and took off. But it's neat to see that sort of convergent game design.

Yeah, I also like the fact that whenever you tag a character out, the character who's resting on the side will automatically start to regenerate energy, but only as far as red damage goes. So, like, if you take a bunch of damage, it's sort of like it'll reduce your life at a certain point, but it'll also leave a big red bar behind, and that will be regenerated if you tag out. But if you tag back in, all your red damage goes away. So if you try to recoup some life and you discover, oh, boy, I'm in trouble again. I need to come back in, then you're just going to lose that. So it's just going to go away. So you have to be, you really have to plan out, you know, when do you tag? When do you switch out?

You know, you don't just go back and forth constantly. You got to sort of plan these things out. Also, it's that the match doesn't end until both characters are out, which for me, like, whenever I play this game in the arcades, I just saw a lot of matches with timeout because, like, that's actually a lot. Like, for the basic timer to count down to get two players out on one side is a tall order sometimes, you know, especially with all the, you know, the leaping and the super jumping and the big moves. Like, maybe you can't get close all the time. Like, I think a lot of matches would just end with, you know, by timeout. And you have to sort of, getting back to like the Red Life thing that you were talking about earlier, like pretty much every tag fighting game followed that.

that mechanic going forward. Like, the tech and games do the same thing. But you also have to be judicious of when you tag in a player or another character because they're always vulnerable after they land. So you can't just, like, in a match against somebody that knows what they're doing, you can't just willy-nilly tag somebody in because they'll just block the incoming attack and then unload on you because you've got a moment of vulnerability. So they're, they balance that pretty well.

They gave a lot of thought to like how a tag mechanic would work and be, fair in a game that is, we keep saying this, not fair. They didn't design it to be not fair. It's just, you know, and you have a combo system this loose and characters this overpowered. You know, it's just going to happen. You do have

advancing guard, which is, I don't think this is the first game with that, but it's like a push block, where you just sort of push them away while you're blocking stuff. I think it's new for this game. I believe it is. I'm pretty sure it's the first Capcom game, unless there's like a dark stalker's. They

They made a lot of weird fighting games in the mid-90s. I don't think Dartstockers had it. I think this is the first Capcom game, but I can't say if it's the first fighting game, period. Yeah, but it's a cool mechanic. It's definitely helpful in this game to just create some space. Yeah, especially because, you know, with all the giant beams and things that are going on, like, if you're stuck blocking some big attack, like, you can just hit the buttons and sort of push the characters apart, and that way you're not maybe trapped, you know, up close so much.

And I believe it's free. I don't think it costs anything, right? It's free. Yeah, it's free in this one. And this is the kind of game, too, where, like, even though there are giant beams and projectiles flying all over the place, most characters or most players want to be in each other's faces.

That's where the big damage comes in. So, like, creating space with the push block was to try to mitigate, like, constant rush down from really good players. Cool game, though. I like this game a lot, too. I would see this pretty frequently. Yeah. way more than the next game we're talking about.

This showed up in a lot of my local arcades and always had a crowd. I was frequently the only guy playing X-Men, Children of the Adam, but I would always see groups of people around this one. Yeah, I still see this one around a fair bit. And it did get home ports. It was on the PS1, which was an awful port. You only really get tag mode if you both play the exact same team. The Saturn port's great, though.

it came with the 4-meg RAM expansion card, and it uses it to retain all of the animation and not have huge amounts of load time. So it's a fantastic version of the game. I remember this was actually being sold in U.S. retailers. Like you could buy it along with something to actually load a Japanese game on your Saturn. Oh, wow. Yeah. I think it was software, et cetera, electronics boutique.

They did good business on Saturn import games, and this was part of it. Because I know that they were selling things like Radiant Silver Gun, but I don't know if I ever saw them selling this one. That's cool. And this is pretty cheap to import. Like if you're a Saturn owner and you've got the whatever that cartridge RAM expansion. Like a 4-1 cart. Yeah. You can find this on eBay pretty inexpensively if you're looking for a good home port of a good Capcom fighting game.

Well, then it's time to go to the next year, and 1997. And I feel like you can hear the brains at Capcom working on this. They're getting so close. They're getting so close to the right answer when they released. Marvel Superheroes versus Street Fighter. You're almost there. You're almost there, folks, okay?

So with this game, the downside of this game is that it's almost entirely existing art. There's only one new character who we'll talk about in a second, but the lineup is basically all characters they've already made. So, you know, Zankev, Sakara, Ken, Cyclops, Shumagorath, Blackheart, Mbison, Akuma, Rew, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Dalcim, Chun, Lee, Dan. Dan? Yes, Dan from Alpha, Captain America Hulk and Omega Red. I do think Dan is funny in this game because he has like super taunts that are like, you know, he throw like, you know, the autographs out of the screen. Yeah, like, he's still the same goofy character, but now he's like supersized, but he's still the same goofy character. He's got to reverse Shungoku Satsu in this one, if I remember. He blows himself up, right? He just self-destructs, I think. Yeah.

I didn't know that. That's awesome. Yeah. It's the exact opposite of, like, inputs, too. Inputs? Oh, wow. And there's, like, a couple hidden characters in this game. There's a, and they're also, like, reusing the same sort of, uh, existing artwork. Like, there's a sunburnt Sakara, who is sort of like the, uh, Dark Hado version.

She also has a Shungoku Satsu. Uh-huh. Uh, you have a shadow who's like an evil, brainwashed shadow lu version of Charlie. Um, he still plays like Charlie, but he gets his own. weird little story in the single player mode. Some of them are a little bit better thought out than others. Like, there's a shadow lady, which is just a dark chunley. But like there's also, um, there's a, an armored Spider-Man where, like, they just

changed the palette to a gray tone, but he's got some hyper armor. He doesn't move as well as regular Spider-Man. But there was an armored Spider-Man in the comics at the time. And so, like, they were trying to push for that kind of stuff. Like there's an alternate Hulk. I think it's a gray Hulk. That's the same thing. He's not as powerful as regular Green Hulk,

but I think he moves a little bit better. I don't know. If anybody know who Desk is, he's a YouTube creator, a big fighting game guy. He did a really great video kind of recently on like all of the hidden characters in this game, what makes them different from the regular characters.

He doesn't really get into the comic book inspirations for some of the Marvel side of these things. But like there's a red, Blackheart, that's supposed to be Mephisto, that kind of thing. U.S. agent. A Black Captain America. So, like, yeah, if you're interested in seeing, like, what the actual gameplay differences are, they're very, very interesting, some more interesting than others. But, yeah, look up that video by Desk.

And the lone new character did not appear in any overseas, you know, if you, if you start, hear the list right now, like, oh, those are the characters. Yep, you listed all the characters. No, there's one more character. This character, and this is the strangest story, I think, of the entire podcast, somehow Capcom decided they were going to include a goofy comedian, Noritake Kinashi. And this guy is still on TV, by the way. He's still working. He's still working in Jared's Media to this day. But I guess one of his characters that he did on TV was this sort of nerdy guy in a schoolboy outfit called Norimaro.

And they decided, okay, we're going to put Norimaro in this game with a bunch of American. superheroes, but only in Japan. So this character does not appear in any overseas version. He's only in Japan. So it's like, yes, it's only in the local version where we'd actually, and we would know who he is, but it also means that there are literally zero unique characters in other versions. I like to, someone noted from a tweet from Akitomo that Norimano was, his deal was that he would appear in whatever game Capcom had furthest along in development, which means he almost showed up in Street Fighter 3. And I kind of want to see that timeline.

Because just imagine this character with like that gorgeous fluid animation. So Akitomo and like, one of the follow up tweets to that was saying that like, well, he was speculating that maybe they lied to Kanishi to tell him that like, oh, this Marvel game is a little bit further along. He should be in that one. But he didn't, he didn't really know. That's just him speculating. But the Marvel side, also according to Akitomo,

the Marvel side of things did not want this character in the game whatsoever. So the deal was he could only be in the Japanese version because Marvel Comics, which was, this is just before I think the bankruptcy, if my timeline is correct in my head. But even there are like, not a chance. We're not putting this guy in a video game that's going to come out anywhere. Like, what about only in Japan? fine.

Yeah, it's funny because if you look at the character select screen, it's all a big grid. And on all the other versions around the world, there's just a logo in one of the boxes. It's just the game's logo, Marvel Super Bowels versus Street Fighter. And in the Japanese version, that's where Norrimo is. So it's like, they didn't even change the screen. They just covered him up with a big sticker, basically. Yeah. I don't know.

Is there anything to say about Nomiato? I mean, he's like, it's a big nerd. Like, he throws, like, pro tractors and shit. it? Like, I don't know. He's really bad. He does, like, no damage whatsoever. Between him and Dan, it's like, okay, so you had these two character slots and you just put in two characters that are not going to do anything. Right. I remember reading, like, game fan and EGM and stuff like that at the time, and they were giving some space to Nortimoto. Like, you know, like, even though this character's only going to come out in the Japanese version of the game, they even knew it at

the time. They're like, you just look at this. Why is this here? And I mean, even they at the time weren't doing that, like, ah, Japanese are, they're funny people. It wasn't that. It was just like, there was a general bewilderment in the U.S. Games press. But I didn't see this game very often either. Like, I think one arcade, I think a bowling alley I went to had this. That's the one and only time I ever really sat down with it. And it's, it is kind of more of the same, you know, when it comes to gameplay, at least for my money.

It does offer some new features with the assist mechanic But like because there are no new characters Because like the game isn't really altered that much This does seem like to me It's just another one of those things that that sort of came and went Also kind of famously broken But not to the degree of the last game But that I think that that gave the last game

A little bit more lasting appeal I don't Kevin you can probably maybe speak to that Yeah, sorry sorry John Are you saying this game wasn't broken enough? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it didn't... But it's exactly what I'm saying. It didn't hit that sweet spot of broken that would make people, like, be interested in it.

Because, okay, they have all these returning characters, right? And they've all been nerfed to hell. They took out basically all the infinites, except Wolverine still has one. He's the one character who can still do BS on the scale of, like, the older game. which means that, oh, hey, now Wolverine is just the lone best character in this game. Like, if someone picks Wolverine and they know the infinite, you're just, you're just boned. So, yeah, I've seen it around. I haven't seen it around nearly as often as I've seen X-Men Street Fighter or Marvel superheroes

or even the later Marvel Capcom games. But it's certainly there. It's got some cool, not to butt in, I'm sorry, but it like, it's got some cool things on the streetfighter side that we're sort of like what we would also see in new generation like you can tell that these games were made sort of in tandem and maybe the teams were we're kind of conversing a little bit because like Ken in this game has his super three from the the street fighter three games but like I mean to a different degree it does kind of like launch him into the air a little bit but it's his kick super um I think this is the first

non-Street Fighter 3 game that were Ryu had the Shinsho Ryuken, I think. If not this, then Marvel versus Capcom 1. But, like, those kinds of things were seeping into the non-Street Fighter 3 stuff, and it was kind of neat to see that evolve. Yeah, in the assist stuff, like, they definitely fleshed that out later. But, yeah, in this one, you can bring in your partner to do a single attack. It's always the same attack. You can't, like, pick what it's going to be.

So, again, some character teams work better with each other than, you know, they do otherwise. It's just now you can't just only take the, you know, combined super into account. You also have to think about your assists as well, which is a big thing for a lot of the later Capcom Marvel crossover games. And that's sort of the first real consideration you have to start thinking about it here. Yeah, going back to just how much of this is reused, even the backgrounds are reused, they just, like, drew in, like, maybe they used a different color scheme, or they added in, like, some other characters, like, I know Gambit and Rogue are on the background of, or on the background of, One stage, there was a stage in X-Men Street Fighter where it's Blanca hanging out in a canyon, and now they added Beast and Blanca. We're basically, like, in the exact same pose, which is very weird for Beast. So, yeah, and then, like, Apocalypse is back again as, like, one of the final bosses.

He's not the final boss, which is an apocalypse enhanced cyberacuma, but... Yes, that's the twist. It's still, like, come on, guys. If there is one new character That's not Nomiato It's cyber Akuma Because like It's basically just Akuma

But they had to redraw the Sprite a little bit Yeah He has wings now He has wings He has wings And like a Mega Man hand Like shoot Launches like a fist

He looks like like What's that early 80s Anime Not Amazinger Z I can't remember But he looks very reminiscent Of like early 80s Mecca

anime which is kind of neat but like yeah it's there's not a whole lot to this game for my money i'm sorry it's fine like if you're got it's a marvel versus game like you can't really go that wrong it's just the least of all of them from this period if you have any other options like just play one of those that's a good way putting it it is the least of them it did get ported uh the PS1 and the Saturn again. Same situation as X-Men Street Fighters. Saturn version uses the 4-meg cart so you get all the

extra animation frames. PS1 is awful and is not worth touching if you have the option. And yeah, because it only came out in Japan. Nortemato is on the Saturn port, so enjoy that. And again, cheap. If you've got a Saturn,

you can get this game, like an import copy of this game, very inexpensive. Yeah. Whereas, like, the, the PS1 version is, like, weirdly expensive in the U.S., which is, like, by far the worst way to play it. So don't do that. Don't pay for that. Don't do that to yourself. No. I just, I have my own anecdote explaining how this game really didn't get much of a release. I, this was about the time where I started working for the United States Post Office. And at that time, anyway, when you work for the post office and you were a clerk like me, they had to send you. to certain offices so that they could train you on how to use, like, the, you know, the computer and stuff to help people and sell stamps and all that stuff. And in my case, I was sent upstate to Patterson, New York. Go ahead, look that up because no one's ever heard of it. Patterson, New York. It is way the hell up, and I think, geez, is it even Duchess County? I don't know where it is. Maybe an Orange County. But, so I was out there, really, you know, nothing post office,

tiny, tiny office, the kind of place, like, all it is, like, it's a counter and, like, a bunch of post office boxes, but it was right next to a deli. And so when I, when I was up there for, I don't know, a week or so doing this, doing this stuff and learning how it works, all my lunch breaks were spent in this one deli next door because, like, where else am I going to go? There's nothing else in Patterson, New York. I'm sorry. And this deli had Marvel Super Heroes for the Street Fighter. So I would go there every day. I'd have my sandwich, and then I would just go to town on this game. And at least once I was late getting back to work because I was playing this game. And in the long run, I wish I spent more time playing this game because,

let's face it. What did I really learn at the post office? Nothing. I didn't learn anything of post office. It was a waste of my time. It was the best pain job ever had, and it was a waste of my time. You learned some super combos out of it. That's true. And I guess real quick, another X-Men cartoon alum, even though, like, this is 1997 and the show is, I think it was over at this point, but they got Len Donchief to play Omega Red for this and the future Marvel appearances of the character. They're like, yeah, you know, the show's off the air. I don't even think it's in reruns, but, you know, if you remember these characters, here you go. Have fun.

Yeah, the X-Men ship had really sailed at this point. Like, I mean, there were still Marvel's probably most popular characters, but this is pre-Iroman movie. This is pre-acquisitioned by Disney. So, like, Marvel was really, and the comics at the time were really flailing because, like, they're all going for, like, you know, how extreme things could be and redesigning all these characters to be really nutty and stupid-looking. Heroes Were Born was so bad. Right. This was the Heroes Were Born era. And the Capcom games sort of, like, backed into doing it right because, like, they had made all these character sprites for all these games years.

before so they had to reuse all these sprites to make games inexpensively so they weren't going to make like just look up thor and what he looked like in 97 like they were never going to make a sprite like this because they didn't have time or the budget to do it and thank god because like i mean that would be sort of the legacy of these games that they were using like marvel like late 90s marvel looking characters um so at the you know marvel for their part we're happy with with the capcom relationship that's why they were like continuing to let them use these characters and license them out and do things like, oh, sure, Armored Spider-Man, that makes sense. Go ahead and do those kinds of things. Because like, I guess early in the relationship

with like the children of the atom phase and the Marvel superheroes, where they were not letting them use characters and it was kind of a little bit of a pushback. By the time this Marvel superheroes had had rolled around. Akimoto has been pretty open about like, yeah, they didn't let us do what we wanted. But like, if I wanted to make an orange vener, for Marvel versus Capcom one, they weren't going to say no. Five years ago, they would have said absolutely not.

So the relationship was a little bit more loose. And again, I think part of that was because Marvel was about to go bankrupt. They were just happy people were licensing stuff from them at that point. I mean, their fortunes certainly turned around in like post-2000 when they got themselves out of bankruptcy, but dark times over there.

Good for us, bad for them, I suppose, because we got these games. as a result of them. Yeah, because this is before the X-Men movie, like, hit, and that brought in a lot of money for Marvel that they desperately needed, even though they really had no creative control over that whatsoever. So, you know, at this point, it's like any port in the storm or any licensing bill that they can get.

Yeah, it's funny. Speaking of stuff from that era, you know, we're recording this in 2024, and only just recently did Universal Studio. is Japan shut down the Amazing Spider-Man ride. And that ride is basically built on, like, the characters and artwork from, like, the Spider-Man cartoon of the 90s. So, like, all those characters, even though, like, most of the characters in the ride are pretty popular, you know, like, you know, Dr. Octopus is there, and Electro is there.

But it's, like, they're very specifically, like, from the cartoon. So, like, Doc Ock has, like, that really weird haircut and, like, the, like, the really big, like, green and yellow, like, sort of, like, body suit. and the most out of place to me is scream. Like one of the symbi- like, it's like a symbiote character. It's like, with like really big hair, and it's like, it's not venom, it's not carnage, it's scream. And it's like, she has been an integral part of this, you know, Osaka fixture for 20 years, and they just shut it down. You know, it is funny because, like, they did have that Iron Man cartoon.

They did have that Spider-Man cartoon. They did not get any of the voice actors from those for any of these games as far as I can tell. Yeah, it's a good point. No, absolutely, you know, it's definitely not, definitely not the guy from Spider-Man Coon in this game. Absolutely not, no. Yeah. Because that guy was playing Greg Brady in the Brady movies in the 90s. It's too busy.

Yeah. Had a lot on his plate. Yeah. So, we could advance the calendar to 1998, but let's save that for its own episode, because I feel like that's a conversation that's going to take a lot longer than we have left on this recording. Because we're coming in up in two hours here, and I feel like this is, everything we've talked about tonight has been sort of, it's set the stage. We went from a weird beat-em-up that maybe was a little bit too late to, increasingly expansive and crowded video games that are just mashing up characters like dolls mashing

to each other, and they're almost about, they're almost supposed to break through and hit something that I think is really, really cool. And we'll talk about that next time at some point. But as an overview, I would say, as we talked about, you know, X-Men hit the same year as Street Fighter 2, the end of Street Fighter 2. And then Street Fighter 3 didn't hit till 97. And as we talked about in Street Fighter 3 episode, it didn't hit so well when a Street Fighter 3 came out. in this period, I feel like, you know, you've got the alpha games, and you've got these games are really sort of holding, holding the brand aloft, like, oh, you want Capcom fighting games? These are here.

You can play these, and these are fun games. And I feel like they're probably, they're doing a lot of heavy lifting, I feel like that, you know, because Street Fighter is sort of not doing so well at this point. But you've got all these games with all these great X-Men characters and Marvel characters and then they fight each other. That's great, wonderful. Yeah, and Capcom was kind of struggling itself for a little while there in the mid-90s until the PlayStation came along. They started making that Resident Evil money.

So I think these being moderately successful in the U.S. especially really helped them out as well. Maybe not to the extent that they were helping out Marvel, but, you know, Capcom was in a better position than Marvel. Let's be real with that. It was a symbiosis, baby. Yeah. And I feel like these might have been one of the first instances of, like, property crossovers in fighting games or in video games in general. Like, you had same company crossovers. Like, you had the, like, the Shonen Jump stuff with, well, the Shodon Jump crossover games on the Famicom. You had, you know, Konami's Y, Y World or King of Fighters. Then you had this, which is two different companies, like, mashing their stuff together, which is now basically all we ever see. in media and especially

fighting games with all these guest characters and like here we are Children of the Adam, here's Akuma as a guest character and just going from there. Which has made recent ports of this difficult. Yeah. Because especially now that like Disney

owns all of this stuff, they may as well buy Capcom at this point. They own everything else. But like I mean we've been blessed in very recent years with like the arcade one up cabinets that kind of cobble all these games and just and I think that they're they're going to make a new one I think um that's got more of this stuff on it but like it was I remember when Street Fighter 4 hit and it made a lot

of money and it did really really well so people are like great can we have a Marvel versus Capcom to re-release and it took a lot of wrangling on the Capcom side to make that happen um and then it got delisted you can't buy that anymore so it's it's been a it's been a wild ride for this stuff. And it's good to see it back, but like it's still difficult to play these in an official way if you're trying to do that. And they also put out their

Marvel versus Capcom Origins collection around the same time as Marvel 2's reissue. I think it was like a year's two later. Had Marvel superheroes and Marvel versus Capcom 1, which we really didn't touch on here. They were bundled together. Again, like Marvel 2, delisted.

Years, years ago, like a decade. But it had some of the best net code of its day. Because this was a period where most fighting games had awful, awful net code. But this is one of the ones that backbone, which became Digital Eclipse, one of the ones they did, which all of theirs had GGPO rollback net code in it. So you could play this online, and it felt good. It felt better than you could get on Fightcade at the time. Now, I mean, people just played on Fightcade. but back in the day.

Those were not, that was not a great option. Different times. Yeah. Yeah, you can't buy it, but I know it's still on my PS3. It's still on my PS3, and I definitely played it. Whenever I last had that thing turned on, I absolutely played this in front of my kids. And, like, they didn't know who anyone was at the point. But I was like, hey, look, kids, this is a fun game.

Let's try it. So that was probably their introduction to Thanos, you know. I don't know if they've seen the movies at this point, you know, because that really hasn't appealed to them that much. But definitely before those movies even came out, they were sitting there in my bedroom watching me play Marvel Superheroes. Like, oh, this is Thanos Children. He hates everything and he wants to kill people. Because he's in love with death, you understand. He's worried about overpopulation kids. It's really, it's a, it's a reverse psychology kind of thing. Children, today we learn about nihilism. It's Shakespearean and

it's storytelling. But on that note, let's wrap things up today. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for listening everybody. I really appreciate you tuning into Retronauts for us. This, of course, has been released for free, and I'm glad you listen to Retronauts for free, but just so you know, if you go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts, you can get all our episodes a week early at a higher bit rate for just $3 a month. However, if you pay $5 a month, just $2 more than the number I just said, well, you get episodes early, and you get two bonus episodes every month. You get a bonus column every week from me, and then I read it to you.

So you don't have to read it yourself. I read it to you, and I put music in there. We also have a monthly community podcast, which is also me and other retronauts talking to you about stuff that's going on in the world. And we have Discord access. That's also included at a $5 level. So really, $5 is a sweet spot there. If you go even higher, you can join us on podcasts.

But that's a bigger story. That's a big ass. That's a big ask. I think for now, let's just agree, you should be paying us $5 a month and getting more episodes of retronauts like this one, and we really appreciate that. John, why don't you tell people where they can find you on the Internet if you want that to happen? Sure, you can find me on Blue Sky. I'm at John Lerned. That's L-E-A-R-N-E-D.

I'm still begrudgingly on Twitter, but I don't really check it as often. And you can find myself on YouTube. I finished the annotated third strike last year. It almost killed me. And I'm never doing something like that again. But I might. Who knows? But yeah, you can find me on YouTube.

Just do a search for me or the annotated third strike or the annotated symphony of the night. Kevin, please. Yes. You can find me on Blue Sky at Ubersaurus. I am also vaguely on Twitter under the same username. I maybe check it like once a week. So don't feel bad.

I do run the Atari Archive Video Series, which is a chronological delving into the history of the Atari 2,600 platform, all the way up to 1982 now. So getting into all the stuff people actually remember, which is exciting. And yeah, you can follow me on social media to hear me ramble occasionally about fighting games. And as for me, you can find me on the internet at my brand new website, fightclub.me. That's F-E-I-T, my last name, C-L-U-B, an English word, dot-M-E, because Fight Club is me. Thank you for listening, everyone. Good night. You know.