The secret MvC website drops more revelations on the game’s development
There’s a lot we would give to be a fly on the wall and witness the original meetings between Marvel and Capcom back in the day to see how decisions were made when creating their first fighting games together.
Luckily, we can now get a bit of a window into what that would have been like with the recent discovery of a secret Japanese Marvel vs. Capcom website featuring developer diaries, which we’ve been able to translate.
The “Secret Web Page” was originally available through a link provided in the Marvel vs. Capcom soundtrack release in Japan that was password protected, and though the site no longer exists, it was thankfully preserved by the Internet Archive to view again over 25 years later.
Among the site’s sections was a multipart Producer’s Essay written by Capcom’s Kenji Kataoka that provided some fascinating insights into the development of the first Marvel vs. Capcom.
We’ve already covered Capcom’s wish and work to put Howard the Duck into MvC as a fighter that Marvel ultimately rejected, but there’s many other characters he brought up too.
Some of those were rejected or off the table while others were permitted and not used.
And there’s a couple cases of rejection reversals that came very late in the process as well.
“I often get asked ‘Why is this character not in the game?’, ‘Hey, put this character in’ or ‘As a player, I would like to use’… A lot of questions or suggestions like this, but for now I’d like to talk about why we chose the heroes we did from the American side, the Marvel side, that is (assuming that Tomichin will talk about the Capcom side at some other point)…” wrote Kataoka back in 1998 as translated by our own Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor.
“When we were starting the development of Marvel vs. Capcom, the contract stated that the four representative characters for Marvel had to be Captain America, Spider-Man, Wolverine and Hulk (meaning that these characters were essentially the faces of Marvel and were not to be excluded under any circumstance), and the contract then also included Gambit, Psylocke, The Mighty Thor, Dr. Doom, Juggernaut, Magneto and Thanos (at this time, the game was still meant to be Marvel Super Heroes 2).
“On top of those, we were also permitted to include Beast, Deathlok, Iron Fist, Quasar, The Submariner, Sasquatch, Machine Man, Electra, Speedball, Spider-Woman and Medusa if we wished to use any of them.
“And even further… For villains, we had Fin Fang Foom, Super-Skrull, The Wizard, Ultron, Diablo, Scorpion, Dr. Octopus… Just take them all, you thieves!!!
“‘Just use whatever you want, bastards’… was how their very kind approach felt, there were so many characters available for us to use.
“But really, why were things like The Fantastic Four, like Silver Surfer, like Ghost Rider not allowed? Why is Iron Man not there?
“Eh??? What’s that’s about??? Huh?
“Like this, we can’t call it ‘Marvel Super Heroes’. That’s what I kept muttering. These characters are all amazing, but if we’re talking recognizability in Japan… ? (To anyone who likes the heroes mentioned above, I’m sorry.)”
It’s very interesting to hear all of this now when the likes of Ultron, Iron Fist and Super-Skrull would eventually make their way into the modern MvC games though most of the rest never did.
While it could have been cool to see the likes of Namor, Deathlok, Speedball, and Quasar back then, including Beast, Spider-Woman, Sasquatch and Machine Man may be seen as a bit redundant with the limited roster space they were already working with for that game.
Dr. Octopus was infamously once planned for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 before not making the final cut, but fans were able to uncover some of assets for the Spider-Man villain in early versions of the game’s code in more recent years.
The team faced a storm of rejections in the development process with Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, and Howard the Duck among those ideas shot down, so some from the Capcom side made the trip to the United States to sit down with the Marvel heads directly.
“We decided we needed to get reasons we could accept and we did have a contract for the game’s development, so together with our boss we traveled to America’s Los Angeles to talk to the Marvel Characters company. We reconvened with the Japanese Marvel Characters agents from Shogakukan Production and entered a meeting.
“We left the contract talk to our superior, and I was just watching… It was my first experience with such a meeting, but it was very educational for me.
“Then we finally got to the character selection.
Again, we presented the characters we wished to use. First, Iron Man… We really wanted him to replace Cyclops as our resident ‘Beam Bastard’ character…
“But, ‘No’.
“There was nothing we could do. I’m so sorry to all the fans.
A different company held the copyright for the character, and since he was still under contract for games we couldn’t use him. The reason War Machine came into the picture was actually from Marvel’s suggestion at this meeting. ‘Change the color and use him and it’s fine.’ … You say it like it’s easy, but in Japan the Iron Man fans won’t accept that, YOU KNOW… Haha.
“At the same time, it turned out that the Fantastic Four and The Mighty Thor were under similar restrictions. We even lowered our request to ask for them as background characters… But in front of the contracts in place, we were powerless.
“Ah, Mr. Dhalsim, uh, no, I mean Mr. Fantastic, Human Torch, The Thing… If you guys were here, we would’ve been able to have so much more fun.
Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer were also not possible (We could’ve just reworked Iceman into the latter… no, that’s a lie).
“But for The Mighty Thor, the contract that restricted him was only in place for America and he was actually perfectly okay to use in the Japanese release… But when we got that okay for him, it was actually right before our roster finalization, pretty far after we’d be able to put more characters into the game.
“For Venom we were told NO at the time of Marvel Super Heroes… So this time, we’d have the same troubles, we thought, but unexpectedly he was a quick ‘OK!!’ now. We felt that they’d finally realized the skill and love we put into character creation at Capcom. It was an explosion of joy for us.
“Jubilee was just my selfish wish. Tomichin (the planner) just wanted to have a new Marvel female character but due to memory issues, we had to cut even Psylocke so our problems became bigger than that. So after that, our only new character was ‘Venom’, and he started whining about it.
“I said ‘Bring her in as an assist’. Tomichin said ‘I understand what you’re saying, Producer Kataoka, but we have to check with Marvel and if they don’t approve it, it’s IMPOSSIBLE. We have no TIME. Let’s do it NEXT TIME…’
“YOU’RE SO COLD, TOMICHIN.
“But, as you can see, she is available as a special assist partner. Tomichin is nice after all. Tomichin also claimed that ‘the next time we add a new female Marvel character, we’ll make it Jubilee’… Yeah, yeah.”
Unfortunately for Kataoka, Jubilee wouldn’t make it into Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or any of the subsequent games, so it seems no one may have fought for her inclusion as much as he did.
It’s so fascinating to now hear how different Marvel vs. Capcom could have been with faster character approvals and if the team wasn’t pushing up against memory limitations of the hardware at the time.
A few roster changes or additions could have changed up the future trajectory of the series in terms of the cast and who would be considered MvC staples afterwards.
And even though we’ve had Doctor Doom and Super-Skrull, fans have been left waiting for the actual Fantastic Four for almost 30 years now.
But now that everything is under the Disney Marvel umbrella now, we’d be much more likely to see Reed, Susan, Johnny and / or Ben finally come to fruition in Marvel vs. Capcom 4 if / when that ever happens.
Many of the other characters outside of maybe Dr. Octopus may never be so lucky, however.
