The 1990s were an amazing time to be a fan of fighting games. The creation of “Street Fighter II” lit the genre on fire, and Capcom found a way to keep fueling it with more and more games of consistently strong quality. This didn’t just mean “Street Fighter,” it also led to the “Darkstalkers” series, some oddball one-offs, and notably for this article, the Marvel series. Starting with Marvel characters and eventually evolving into a crossover with Capcom icons, a number of classic fighters were released that have been largely inaccessible for years. But all that changed with an announcement made during June18th’s Nintendo Direct Switch.
The series began In 1994 with the release of “X-Men: Children of the Atom” for the arcade. The game took the mechanics of “Street Fighter II” that had been refined over several iterations, and increased the scope and power of the fighters to higher levels. Now that they were playing in Marvel’s sandbox, Capcom knew the X-Men had to be showcased in all of their glory. However, the developer didn’t keep the game exclusive to just X-Men. They included the infamous Street Fighter character, Akuma into the picture to mix things up.
The greater Marvel universe opened up after that with 1995’s “Marvel Super Heroes” that took its characters and story from the Infinity Gauntlet comic story arc. It would later pave the way for “X-Men vs. Street Fighter” in 1996, the “Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter” title in 1997 and the full-on “Marvel vs. Capcom” in 1998. At that point, Capcom just threw the gloves off and made no pretenses about this being limited to the cast of “Street Fighter,” everything under their banner was fair game. It all culminated in “Marvel vs Capcom 2” in 2000 that included 56 characters and teams of three vs. three duking it out for supremacy.
Anyway, skip ahead to 2024 and if you wanted to play any of the aforementioned games, good luck. Outside of the arcade, the home releases of these titles were limited to the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Dreamcast. To their credit, the Sega console versions are often considered to be virtually arcade perfect. Given the horrible sales of the Saturn and Dreamcast, most people probably played these games on the PlayStation outside of the arcade. If you did, you’d be met with extremely inferior port no matter which game you were playing. Heavy compromises were made to these games, including removing the ability to swap out characters in some of them.
This upcoming release of “Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics” is fixing that in the best way possible. The compilation packages together all of the above mentioned games and adds in “The Punisher,” a side-scrolling beat ’em up that was only ever introduced to consoles in the form of a lackluster port to the Genesis. The official Capcom website for the upcoming release even takes time to mention these versions of the games will include many of the secret fighters that weren’t accessible in the original arcade releases.
In addition to this, the titles include online multi-player, new training modes, artwork and music galleries, adjustable difficulty levels, and more. The only other time some of these games got a release was when “Marvel Super Heroes” and the first “Marvel vs. Capcom” game got an online release in 2012 as the “Marvel vs. Capcom Origins” collection. That was pulled from the Xbox and PlayStation stores not long after, making all of these titles incredibly hard to get ahold of.
No exact release date has been given for “Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics” but it’s due sometime in 2024. Even though it was announced during the Nintendo Direct presentation, it will be available for PlayStation 4, and Steam.
You can watch the entire Direct below:
