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Battle of the Mascots
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
The beautifully designed opening to Capcom's newest one-on-one fighting game, Capcom vs. SNK, pretty much says it all. Rumors swirled for years that the heroes from Capcom's most popular fighting series, Street Fighter II, would match up against the heroes from one of SNK's biggest series; first the rumors suggested Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting, and later King of Fighters. Such a match-up seemed natural, yet highly unlikely.
SNK, after all, had pioneered the crossover fighting game, taking characters from a number of its most popular games and blending them into what came to be known as the King of Fighters games. In King of Fighters, eight-bit adventure and shooting game legends such as the Ikari Warriors and Athena found new life as combatants alongside established 16-bit brawlers Terry and Andy Bogard, Ryo Sakazaki, Robert Garcia, and Geese Howard. Capcom later built on SNK's idea, creating X-Men vs. Street Fighter by melding two of its earlier fighting games together with new backgrounds and super-powerful special attacks; thereafter, its highly successful Marvel Vs. Capcom was created by adding a number of Marvel's super heroes to a small collection of Street Fighters, Darkstalkers, and established Capcom mascots such as Mega Man and Strider Hiryu. Why not, then, pit the best Capcom characters against the best of SNK's characters?
There were plenty of reasons not to do it. First, no game company attempted to use its competitors' characters in a game before. Though Asian game pirates developed, without legal permission, a couple of knock-off 16-bit game cartridges setting the Tekken opponents against Virtua Fighter characters, for example, no game companies made the necessary legal arrangements to license each others' characters for use in a hybrid game. Second, there was still some bad blood between Capcom and SNK. After the runaway success of the first Street Fighter II title, Capcom's best character designers jumped ship and joined SNK to create the Fatal Fury series, which by its second title successfully challenged the mighty Street Fighter II in visual and game play acumen. And there were technical challenges, too - the artwork for SNK's King of Fighters character designs differed enough from Capcom characters to require new character artwork to make a combined game work. Height and proportion were two major concerns, such that simply mixing the old art from the two games would yield some characters with disproportionately large heads or arms, and giants such as Zangief would likely look just about the same size as average-height SNK characters.
Yet, unlike so many rumors of teaming two big game companies' characters in one game, Capcom and SNK actually made an official announcement of the game two years ago, and the decision included the most popular of Capcom's Super Street Fighter II characters and SNK's King of Fighters characters in the mix. New artwork was developed, Sega's Naomi arcade hardware was chosen, and the two companies' staffs came together as one. Surprisingly, SNK's artists were charged with drawing Capcom character art, and vice-versa, yielding familiar but somewhat new interpretations of both companies' heroes. And the final product, without delving into review category, is a highly impressive synergy of both companies' best games. Coming as it does amidst hard times for SNK - layoffs of much of its development staffs and decisions to forego future arcade development - the game is an especially fitting testament to the last eight years of both companies' products.
Other game companies have created fighting games complete with their own most popular heroes, often with surprisingly positive results. Nintendo's Super Smash Brothers set Mario and Luigi in two- to four-player battles against Starfox, Donkey Kong, Kirby and Link. Sega's Fighters Megamix primarily used Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers characters, but also added bizarre new "mascots" such as Daytona USA cars, the obscure RPG character Rent-a-Hero, and characters from the little-known Sonic the Hedgehog fighting game, Sonic the Fighters. There's precedent, then, for unusual match-ups of wildly disparate characters in the fighting context. What's next: Nintendo vs. Sega? Sony vs. Capcom?
Along with the impediments Capcom faced when dealing with SNK, many other companies face even more substantial hurdles. Sony, for example, owns very few of the PlayStation's most successful characters - Lara Croft is owned by Eidos, the Tekken team is owned by Namco, Crash Bandicoot and Spiro the Dragon are owned by Universal Interactive, and the Final Fantasy characters are owned by Square. Sony does, however, own the Twisted Metal characters, Parappa the Rapper, and any number of contracts with famous music and movie stars that might lead to a successful team-up fighting game. Michael Jackson, a longtime Sony music artist, has recently permitted his likeness to be used in Sega's Space Channel 5 and Midway's Ready 2 Rumble Round 2. Since almost anyone would savor the opportunity to punch out the self-proclaimed King of Pop, Michael might just prove the ideal bridge video game character between the long feuding Sega and Sony camps.
And political concerns continue to dog game companies, as well. For years, Nintendo and Sega were afraid that consumers might believe that their best-known mascots would make other appearances on competing game machines. This tension might be lifting, however, given Sega's recent splintering of its development teams into autonomous companies that have the option to develop for non-Sega game platforms. Sony, perhaps the most permissive (or least powerful) company regarding the appearance of its key characters on competing machines, has also welcomed almost any major company wishing to develop titles for its PlayStation platforms. Thus, a Sega vs. Sony team-up is perhaps the most likely of the major competitors. If you include Namco, the former rival of Sega in arcades, a team-up there seems highly possible, too - Virtua Fighter vs. Tekken might go legitimate, after all.
But need the team-up be in fighting games? Not necessarily, and perhaps, not even preferably. Capcom's and SNK's fighting heroes were best lent to another fighting game, but most of the best characters from Nintendo, Sega and Sony games are not really brawlers. What would the world think of a dance and music game developed by Sega with back up by the Samba de Amigo crew, but starring Sony's Parappa the Rapper? Or a multi-player online version of the Legend of Zelda with game play by Nintendo, character designs and online code by Sega, set in the worlds developed by Sega's Beyond Oasis and Legend of Oasis development team Ancient? System competition can be a very good thing. But as Capcom and SNK have proved, sometimes, it's even better to join up - if only temporarily.
