Capcom Celebrates The Start Of Marvel Vs. Capcom, & Marvel’s Road To Cultural Omnipotence

Capcom has shared a new trailer for Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, that celebrates the start of the franchise, as well as one of the starting points for Marvel’s now omnipotent presence in pop culture.

The game in the spotlight from the collection this time is X-Men: Children of the Atom, the first fighting game Capcom made with the Marvel Comics license. At this time, Marvel was far from the Disney managed behemoth it is today. It was still a comic book company first, and owned by billionaire Ron Perelman.

As revealed in Polygon’s oral history of this game, Marvel’s and Capcom’s collaboration came about out of convenience. Marvel wanted to break into Japan, and they had Konami’s X-Men arcade game release to some success in America, but not as successful in Konami’s home country. On the flip side, one of Capcom’s developers, Yoshiko Okamoto, managed to broker this deal with the comic book company, and told his peers that they could make any game they wanted.

We won’t go too in deep on Polygon’s article, which is worth reading on its own. But a significant part of X-Men: Children of the Atom’s puzzle is that Capcom developers’ imaginations ran wild on what they could do with superheroes, and especially mutants. If you played Street Fighter II, even Hyper Street Fighter II with its insane speed, even that seemed more grounded compared to X-Men: Children of the Atom. The mutants were launching their enemies mid-air, even scrolling to the top of the screen, to hit each other with the longest combos Capcom could imagine at the time.

There were real fans of Marvel Comics at Capcom as well, and you can see their passion in the original art they made of the X-Men and other Marvel characters for these games. The truth is, it was Marvel and X-Men fans who helped steer Capcom’s direction in game design, to the seemingly chaotic, but ornate and refined mechanics that Capcom fighting games have today. By extension, the wave of even more complex 2D fighting games that emerged in the 2000s, exemplified by the likes of Guilty Gear and Melty Blood, all draw inspiration from Capcom, and so they can also trace their game design history to Japanese X-Men fans.

In the years following this game’s release, Marvel would go bankrupt, and then be bought out by Avi Arad and Isaac Perlmutter, the owners of Toy Biz. Arad and Perlmutter would then take Marvel on the road to making movies, but also find new waves of success in the comic business itself. Capcom would also expand beyond fighting games, finding so much success in titles like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry that they would take an unofficial seven year hiatus from making new big budget fighting games, between Capcom vs. SNK 2 in 2001, and Street Fighter IV in 2008.

Marvel and Capcom would have a rocky road in renewing their relationship too, but as we now see, everything has aligned for them to finally re-release X-Men: Children of the Atom for the first time in 26 years.

Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is releasing on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. You can watch their dedicated X-Men: Children of the Atom trailer below.