It’s been well over a decade now since Marvel vs. Capcom 3 arrived on the scene, which is now being kept alive and growing thanks to dedicated players and a modding community that continues to add new stuff to the fan-favorite game.
On top of that, a group of Marvel modders recently got their hands on an old version of MvC3 for the Xbox 360 that still contained data on the disc for a good bit of cut content that never made it in (or at least not at that time).
Some familiar names including Tabs, Eternal Yoshi and Xeno did a deep dive through the original files when things got really interesting.
They managed to uncover actual character select screen portraits for Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus as well as Dead Rising’s Frank West, who was originally planned for vanilla MvC3 but didn’t make the cut until Ultimate.
Along with Both Frank (who we knew was supposed to be in vanilla but was pushed to ultimate), Doc Ock was also ment to be a fighter in Vanilla 3 but due to IRL events he had to be scrapped. he and his tentacles would have occupied Arcs 40 and 41 due to the arms being attached.
— Xeno – Coms Open 3/5 (@Xeno_TG) September 27, 2023
The group was also able to insert some of those assets back into the base game including Doc Ock on the select screen as well as his fighter name for matches although they were unable to recover his battle theme, which was apparently finished and never saw the light of day as far as we’re aware.
It’s been known that Doc Ock was originally planned for MvC3 and was “worked on for a very long time” for years now, but this is the first real physical evidence we’ve seen of his existence, which is pretty exciting.
Due to the game being an early beta build alot of the character themes and music overall was missing. For example in terms of the main game itself outside of fighting only 3 songs were in, The Face off Theme ,The OG victory theme, And the Character Select theme pic.twitter.com/cAVEsHsGkC
— Xeno – Coms Open 3/5 (@Xeno_TG) September 27, 2023
Generally, it is believed that the villain didn’t make it into the game due to technical issues with his tentacle arms though we haven’t found a source outright stating such.
Beyond those characters, other files were discovered including unused color palettes and voice lines as well as an unfinished stage and music.
If you actually go ahead and boot you’ll see that some lines are different from the end game both in text and voicelines! “I hear bullets taste just like chicken hahaha” pic.twitter.com/VRt3R6C4Yj
— Xeno – Coms Open 3/5 (@Xeno_TG) September 27, 2023
Some of them were managed to be restored too and shown off online for all to see what didn’t quite make the cut.
There’s plenty of other Marvel characters who were considered for the fighting game roster at one point or another that were revealed by director Ryota Niitsuma as well as their basic reasons for not getting in.
following 1upmiles’s discovery of an available version of an early mvc3 build and the doc ock stuff i took a peek and just replaced the files to see what the few assets left looked like ingame instead of havin to do the whole mess w/ converting colortypes on the textures etc pic.twitter.com/WapXNMkYJz
— tabs (@tabs_mvc) September 28, 2023
If there exists any more pertinent data on these older versions of MvC3, these talented modders will probably dig it up at some point, but it seems like they may be busy with another project we’ll discuss more shortly.
Thor has this color in the beta. This was the color I remade in Color Expansion. pic.twitter.com/wZy86K4U9i
— Eternal Yoshi (@EternalYoshi) September 28, 2023