Especially here in the (slowly but surely developing) age of cross play, the idea of having platform-exclusive fighting game characters comes across as absolutely bogus from square one, but that actually wasn’t always the case.
A recent video exploration from MrMixtape takes us back through more than a quarter century of examples wherein developers designed rosters for the same games that looked a little different depending on the console you were using.
This was something we saw as recently as 2011 wherein God of War’s Kratos had so much momentum from God of War 3 that it carried him right into Mortal Kombat 9. Though this momentum was strong, it wasn’t enough to get him into the Xbox 360 or PC versions of the game as he and his special stage were PlayStation 3 exclusives.
Immediately the issues with this kind of practice become apparent for competitive players as such fighters all but have to be banned in tournaments given the fact that only a minority of your player base has access to them.
In theory this could drive sales up if players were willing to purchase the same game on different platforms, but that can be a hard sell to even a portion of the Pokemon crowd and so the idea that a significant number of fighting game players might do this for a single character or two seems highly unlikely.
Many of us are aware of the Soul Calibur franchise doing this a few times back in the days of SC2 and SC4 where Spawn, Heihachi, and Link were available on Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo consoles, respectively, but there are actually a lot more instances across many more franchises.
We’ll let Mr.Mixtape take it from here, but let us know in the comments if you were surprised or learned anything new once you’ve had a chance to watch.