The development of X-Men vs. Street Fighter was quite the iconic period of time for the Fighting Game Community, considering the developers abandoned game balance due to time constraints, and that a bug during the development process would later inspire the Variable Cross mechanic in Marvel vs. Capcom.
Diving further into the development of the 1996 release of X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the game’s planner, Atsushi Tomita, decided to make the tag/switching mechanic the game’s selling point, which clearly worked out well for the long term health of the franchise.
“For the tag/switch system, it was something that already existed in Pro Wrestling games. It wasn’t a particularly fresh idea and was something that anyone could’ve come up with (and they did, since Groove On Fight and Kizuna Encounter were released around the same time with such a system),” Tomita wrote.
“Our approach was to not lose out against other similar games which led us to make the tag attack itself be an invincible move and free to use at any time so that players could experience the fun of it right away,” he added.
The tag mechanic, and the systems based around this would become a huge staple in the Capcom Versus games after this release, where you saw things like Delayed Hyper Combos (DHCs) and other moves that involved using multiple characters to finish out attacks.
At the time, Atsushi Tomita was worried about the CPS2 arcade board keeping up with other competitors in the scene. The CPS2 board was released in 1993, debuting with the arcade version of Super Street Fighter 2.
“The CPS2 board already had weak capabilities compared to rival arcade boards at the time (about two to three years after its release) and felt outdated, but it was better than any others at having many objects (sprites) on screen at once, so we made use of that by making sure that no objects disappeared when you did team supers or similar things, and I think in that area we managed to have an advantage over our competitors,” said Tomita.
Once they embraced the capabilities of the CPS2 board, the developers of X-Men vs. Street Fighter decided to make characters tagging in a major feature, which was a decision that has permeated throughout the Versus series lifespan.
“Back then, we were just using the Marvel Super Heroes system, but halfway through we decided to make tagging/switching the selling point,” said Tomita. “I have nothing but gratitude for our main programmer Ikawa-san who took such an unreasonable request for an overhaul and made it reality.
“For the tag pose, we just used the win or taunt poses, and while we originally intended to have different tag attacks for each character, the kick we did first fit so well that we figured it’d be good to have a systematic feel to it and made everyone come in with a kick,” remarked Tomita.
“Making them all look as polished as each other seemed like it’d take too much development time, and also having them all look fairly similar felt like it would be easier for players to digest and adapt to,” he added.
Another way in which the game changed during development was the Super Jump particle effect. This was originally a hit effect one of the development teams members made, but it fit much better around the super jump animations in the game, although it got there by mistake.
“The sparkling little particles when you do a Super Jump in X-Men vs. Street Fighter was actually originally a hit effect that Mr. Sagata made, but we concluded that this doesn’t really feel like a hit impact so it won’t work,” said Tomita.
“Then, we had some kind of issue with the programming and it showed up during Super Jumps. We weren’t quite sure of how that happened, but it looked nice so we just decided to make it a Super Jump effect,” Tomita noted about how a bug once again became part of the game.
Working insane hours to make your visions come to life is nothing new in the video game industry, and the development of X-Men vs. Street Fighter was no exception.
“It’s unthinkable in today’s climate, but Ikawa-san would always work late into the night and I’d always work hard to make sure I stayed up later than he did,” noted Tomita.
If you want to go further, check out our Marvel vs. Capcom news section here on EventHubs, where you can find all of the latest news about the Capcom Versus series.
A big thanks to Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor for the translations that were used in this story.
Source: Event Hubs
