Atsushi Tomita is well regarded for his work on X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter. Everything came to a head when he acted as the Designer for Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes.
Some time ago, Tomita revealed interesting pieces of information regarding his time developing the games that would eventually pave the path forward for the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Nicholas MajinTenshinhan Taylor has provided us with translations of what he said.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes was the first game in the Marvel and Capcom crossover series of fighting games that featured the assist system. Unlike with Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the original Marvel vs. Capcom tasked players with selecting two main fighters and a dedicated assist at the character select screen.
Through Marvel vs. Capcom’s first assist system, Capcom was apparently able to accomplish two goals. First off, turning iconic Marvel characters into assists would save Capcom on development costs.
For a lot of these characters, Capcom had already designed the assets for them. Many of these assists were actually featured as playable characters in previous games. As such, it was far easier to turn someone into an assist rather than a full-fledged combatant.
However, the primary goal was to cater to fans of certain characters. Without the assist system, these sort of characters were unlikely to get any representation within the game.
“As for the Marvel side’s assists, we thought that using characters we’d already made would make players nostalgic and happy for them as well as save on development efforts on our side, so it was a two birds with one stone approach,” said Tomita.
“As for the Marvel side’s assists, we thought that using characters we’d already made would make players nostalgic and happy for them as well as save on development efforts on our side, so it was a two birds with one stone approach.” — Atsushi Tomita
Of course, Marvel didn’t approve of all of Capcom’s requests for characters. For example, Capcom originally wanted Galactus to be the final boss, but eventually settled on Onslaught.
Fortunately, Marvel was said to be very cooperative when it came to most of Capcom’s requests to use their characters as assists. Based on Tomita’s wording, it sounds like Capcom was anticipating difficulties getting approval from Marvel since they would effectively be putting major characters like The Mighty Thor into minor roles. Tomita even described Marvel as being “very generous” in this regard.
“Even if we weren’t asking for them as playable characters, Marvel were very generous and even let us use major characters such as The Mighty Thor and the very popular (at least among our team) Jubilee, so we were very happy to bring them in,” continued Tomita.
Marvel vs. Capcom’s assist system would eventually become an integral part of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s mechanics, though the system would ultimately be reworked to have characters function both as playable actors and assists.
Source: Event Hubs
