Once more I find myself doing a dive into Marvel’s vast library of characters to find yet another highly iconic and popular character who simply never got a chance in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
While this isn’t surprising by any means — as stated, Marvel’s character pool is beyond gigantic — this one actually does come off as a bit peculiar if for no other reason then that Capcom actually made a well-received game with this very character only a few years before X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the game which eventually spawned the long-running Marvel vs. Capcom franchise.
Most of readers have probably already pieced together who I’m talking about, if not from the description then from the banner image which showcases the iconic skull motif of one of Marvel’s most unrelenting tough-on-crime vigilantes, The Punisher.
Originally appearing as a foe of Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man #129 from 1974, Frank Castle (the real name of The Punisher) was hunting Spider-Man because he was believed to be a murderer.
In this early depiction, The Punisher is shown to be absolutely ruthless against criminals and unlike most heroes you’ll find in Marvel’s library he had absolute no qualms with killing career criminals as he believed this to be the most morally righteous course of action — stopping them for good.
This characterization of The Punisher has stayed consistent throughout the years long after he outgrew his origin as a Spider-Man foe, with his motivation for being so brutal towards criminals rooted in him having lost his wife and two children due to them accidentally being nearby during a mob hit and being killed for being inconvenient witnesses.
In 1985, The Punisher received his first own comic and ever since then he has become one of Marvel’s most enduring and popular characters with his own comic book running for more than 250 issues as of writing.
His popularity transcends just comics as well with three feature-length movies being made in 1989, 2004 and 2008, respectively, several video games (including one Capcom made in 1993 which is included in the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection) and also been part of several special comics and crossovers including perhaps the most bizarre one which sees him encountering Archie Andrews. Yes… that Archie.
Not only that, but The Punisher saw even more attention via the Marvel Cinematic Universe where he appeared in Netflix’s Daredevil TV series and from it spun off into his own TV show which ran for two seasons and is soon to see a new television special in 2026 following up on his story line in said cinematic universe.
Basically, The Punisher has had a very strong presence not just in the comics but in the media surrounding them for over 30 years now, to the point which would make many other comic book characters green with envy.
So why was he excluded from Marvel vs. Capcom? His popularity has been very high during the 1990s into the 2000s which is the prime time for being included in these projects.
It’s hard to say why The Punisher was left out of the early games as I couldn’t find any quotes of developers really mentioning him at all.
One thing which comes to mind is the problem with licenses which plagued Marvel throughout the ’90s, which is when X-Men vs. Street Fighter and the first Marvel vs. Capcom were being worked on.
Marvel vs. Capcom producer Kenji Kataoka talked about it in some recently translated blog posts which we covered a few months ago, though he never directly mentioned The Punisher himself.
“There was nothing we could do. I’m so sorry to all the fans. A different company held the copyright for [Iron Man], and since he was still under contract for games we couldn’t use him.” — Kenji Kataoka
He talks about how contracts were in place for many of Marvel’s different characters for their game rights, sometimes done in such a bizarre way that while Iron Man wasn’t allowed to be included, they could just change his armor to gray and say that it was War Machine and it would be fine.
Lots of characters get mentioned in these talks, also relating how the Fantastic Four and Thor weren’t approved for use, so it’s entirely possible that The Punisher had something similar restricting him.
However, it does seem strange considering that Marvel had already permitted Capcom to make a The Punisher game in 1993 which was well-received.
Not only does this make it seem like Capcom, if anyone, should hold the rights to The Punisher for games, it also makes it so that they could likely re-use some of the sprite work from that game and convert to their fighting games, especially for Marvel vs. Capcom 2 which notoriously re-used sprite work from tons of different games for its roster.
There’s never been anything specifically said regarding this, but given how strict Marvel’s rights were at the time and how much these contracts changed on seemingly a daily basis, it’s possible that Capcom only had the game rights for The Punisher back in 1993 but no longer retained them at the time of fighting game crossovers.
Whatever the case, we ended up not seeing The Punisher in the early sprite-based Marvel vs. Capcom games and there’s been no real comment on it. So what about Marvel vs. Capcom 3?
Well, for this one there actually was a clarification on The Punisher and it was fairly early on during the game’s promotional tour, almost a full year before the full release of the original version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
In 2010, Capcom-Unity did a streamed interview with Ryota Niitsuma, Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s producer, where they touched upon certain characters and outright ruled them out from the roster, a practice which seems unthinkable of today, only 15 years later.
While there’s no direct transcribed version of what Niitsuma said, he mentioned six specific characters that would not be in the game — Phoenix Wright and God Hand’s Gene from the Capcom side and Emma Frost, Daredevil, Ghost Rider and The Punisher for Marvel’s side. Phoenix Wright and Ghost Rider would later appear in the enhanced version Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
Why these specific characters were mentioned is unclear, though it’s been claimed in an old Reddit comment on /r/Kappa by user slib_ that he was at this very panel and that Niitsuma had said that his personal favorite character they worked on was Emma Frost, but they ended up stopping development on her presumably in favor of Phoenix.
It’s entirely possible that all of these characters were actually worked on at some point which is why Niitsuma specifically mentioned these, but that hasn’t been confirmed.
On the subject of The Punisher, though, Niitsuma did clarify his reasons for not including him by saying that he was too similar to Chris Redfield from Resident Evil, who was part of the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 roster.
This makes sense considering both of them fight without any superpowers and generally make use of all kinds of weapons from pistols and machine guns to rocket launchers and grenades.
When you consider what a moveset for The Punisher might look like, it genuinely doesn’t feel too different from what Chris already presents in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
So is that it, then? Is The Punisher just an unlucky victim of circumstance who happened to be too similar to a main protagonist from one of Capcom’s most successful franchises? Well, for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 at least, that definitely seems to be the case based on the limited information we have.
At the moment, there’s nothing on the horizon for the Marvel vs. Capcom series that we’re aware of, but if we do get to see a Marvel vs. Capcom 4 in the future, The Punisher still remains more relevant than ever with a strong presence in comics, TV shows and gaming itself as one of the central characters in the highly successful Marvel Rivals.
With Resident Evil having lots of different abilities and characters they could potentially include, might we see a reversal in any future project where The Punisher is included as the “gun guy” and Resident Evil taps more into its supernatural elements for its picks (something that was already largely done in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with Wesker, Jill and Nemesis T-Type, I might add)?
It’s hard to say. With these crossover titles, it all comes down to what’s relevant at the time of development starting and predicting the future isn’t going to be easy when it comes to two juggernauts like Marvel and Capcom, if they ever even collaborate again to begin with.
However, given that he’s one of the more morally gray characters in Marvel’s roster and not always easy to simply put into a “hero” or “villain” category given the brutality of his methods, I’ve always wanted to see what he’d have to offer in a game like this, especially in one as rich with extra dialogue and easter eggs like Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
Hopefully Frank will get his time in the future. Until then, we’ll always have the 1993 arcade game if we want to wail on Kingpin for a bit.
Source: Event Hubs
