But then Marvel stepped in and said heck no
The Marvel vs. Capcom series began life 30 years ago now, and there’s gotta be so many fascinating development stories going back and forth between the companies across the globe from each other that fans are never made aware of.
A real gold mine of information, however, was recently uncovered as a secret Marvel vs. Capcom website from all the way back in 1998 that includes a bunch of behind-the-scenes details and cut content from one of the lead developers.
As pointed out by SeventhForce, the first Marvel vs. Capcom’s soundtrack release in Japan apparently came with a link to a “Secret Web Page” that was password protected.
Although the website itself no longer exists, the pages have been preserved thanks to the Internet Archive including those found after providing the right login credentials.
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff to be found by poking around the defunct site like remixes of character themes that are still available to listen to, but that’s not why we’re here today specifically.
Instead, we’re going to be focusing on the Producer’s Essay portion of the site written by Kenji Kataoka, who is still at Capcom to this day.
…But the .AIF links aren’t! Here’s Chun’s. The intro is slightly longer than the theme in the final game, and the quality is fuzzy because again, AIF file from 26 years ago, but it’s neat to hear the slight differences compared to the final game! pic.twitter.com/sFCnIuro2R
— SeventhForce (@SeventhForce) December 18, 2024
It was of course basically all in Japanese, but we’ve got the translations thanks to our own Nicholas ‘MajinTenshinhan’ Taylor.
There Kataoka wrote quite a lot about the development of Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes and their interactions with Marvel that led to a lot of ideas not making it into the game.
He also gave the very interesting tidbit that the first MvC was actually originally going to be Marvel Super Heroes 2.
Kataoka revealed a multitude of characters and bosses that were in consideration, but at least one of them was really being worked on before being shut down.
That was Howard the Duck.
“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)” wrote Kataoka in his essays.
“For character choices, popularity isn’t everything. You want normal character, power character, speed characters… Characters who can fly, bastards who shoot beams… You think about a lot of these things while picking your roster.
“So with all these things to consider, we decided our roster to be Captain America, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, The Mighty Thor, Psylocke, Venom, Jubilee, Mr. Fantastic, Howard The Duck…
“Howard the Duck is a character who’s a duck, do you all know about him? People who know know, there was a movie with Lea Thompson in the ’80s and he was the main character, that DUCK right there. Did you know that’s a Marvel character?
“And finally, for the boss we decided on Galactus, the VS series was already well-versed in gigantic bosses (At that point, we figured Onslaught would be impossible to get permission for…)
“BUT THEN, when we submitted this list to Marvel, what we got back was ‘NO!!’
“Iron Man? No. Fantastic Four? No. Venom? No way. Howard the Duck? Absolutely not… No, no way, no how, a complete STORM of rejections.”
The Producer came back to the subject of Howard in one of his following posts revealing they had initially had permission to use the duck and were actively working on him.
“So earlier in part 2 of these notes, I mentioned Howard The Duck.
He was meant to be included in a way similar to Dan where he isn’t really using any martial art and fighting as a joke character.
“Our character designer was totally on board with the idea as well and thought up a lot of fun concepts for him. Marvel also kept telling us it was OK until mid-way through.
“Then, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden it was a ‘Nooooo!!!’ Why??? WHAT DID WE DO???
“The Marvel representative told us, ‘He has no popularity right now. He’s not cool. We want you to use characters that are more fitting as super heroes,’ etc., etc… He’s not a character we picked for that purpose, man!
“No matter how much we tried to explain the concept, if they say no then it’s NO. Our character designer at the time had fallen in love with this character concept (and put lots of fun ideas into him) and even wrote his own petition which he sent to Marvel.
“We had already half completed the character too. We tried forcing it through, but then were told that we had to talk to Disney to make sure that he wasn’t too similar to their Donald Duck character, a process which would require A LOT more time from us…
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN!?!
“Well, it was a lot of stuff like that, and we ended up giving up on him. And then we decided on Gambit, who was quite popular in the west. So it’s probably all for the best in the end.”
While it is cool to hear about all of this now, there’s also some disappointment that we’ll probably never see what Capcom had cooking up for Howard all those years ago.
This actually isn’t the first time Howard had actually been mentioned for the game either.
Former Capcom artist Katsuya Akitomo shared a series of posts back in 2020 where he talked about the pluckiest duck for a part, however, his info contradicts Kataoka a bit.
The artist wrote that Howard the Duck was rejected by MvC planner Atsushi Tomita because his comedic character pitch overlapped with Norimaro, the secret joke character in X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
138.
『MvC』では、出演候補に挙がっていたが企画の富田くんに拒否されたマーヴルキャラが２人いる。一人はハワード・ザ・ダック。アヒルが知的生命に進化した別次元の出身で、一見可愛いのに口が悪く短気。シルエットが特徴的なのでいいかと思ったが、「お笑いキャラは憲磨呂と被る」と没。 pic.twitter.com/6205iwetOT
— ブラスコウ／秋友克也 (@sjxqr393) November 1, 2020
Since Akitomo doesn’t seem to be officially credited in Marvel vs. Capcom, it’s unclear how much first-hand knowledge he has on the situation that unfolded or perhaps he was referring to the character originally being pitched for the previous game too.
There’s also the good chance Howard was rejected on both ends by Marvel and Capcom for different reasons.
Fan discussions and speculations about Howard’s chances of appearing in an MvC entry has continued to pop up for modern titles, so there is still at least a section of players who would like to see him get some representation at some point.
More people may know the name Howard the Duck now, but he’s still not exactly a Marvel icon that’s receiving any major push outside of comics — so we’re not really sure his chances would be that good even if Marvel vs. Capcom 4 does come to pass.
Howard has at least appeared in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, so he has been around for the more general audience to see a handful of times in the cinematic universe.
We’ll also be delving more into the development secrets shared by Kataoka very soon, so stay tuned to learn more about how Marvel vs. Capcom came together — and who or what didn’t ultimately make the cut.
Contributions to this story were made by Nicholas ‘MajinTenshinhan’ Taylor. Image via Howard the Duck.