Before they came to the consoles, fighting games originated at the arcades. As such, developers had a tendency to develop unplayable boss characters that were essentially designed to suck in more of the players’ quarters before they reached the end.
Of course, this meant that these bosses were intentionally designed to be stronger than the roster of fighters that the users were allowed to choose from. One way or another, however, many of these boss characters ended up becoming playable.
A few months ago, MrMixtape released a video that went over a few of the bosses that eventually became playable characters. For the most part, these characters went from being unreasonably overpowered, to being more inline with the rest of the roster in the games that they existed in.
X-Men: Children of the Atom served as the first fighting game developed by Capcom that involved the Marvel intellectual property. Magneto ended up serving as the final boss. Since he initially wasn’t intended to be used by humans, he was designed to be ridiculous.
Funnily enough, Magneto had access to a super that basically made him invincible for a full 15 seconds. Needless to say, this synergized well with his homing, unblockable special.
When Magneto was made part of the base roster for Marvel Super Heroes, he was expectedly toned down. Ultimately, Magneto was considered to be fairly weak overall, but he did end up making a comeback later during the Marvel vs. Capcom entries. Even though Magneto would have his time as a top tier, there was at least a sense of fairness to him, which is something that couldn’t be said of his boss incarnation.
Similarly, Gill in Street Fighter 3 was intentionally designed to blatantly be a better version of Urien. Additionally, while every character in Street Fighter 3: Third Strike had to choose between one of three different supers at the start of each match, Gill was the only character that was armed with all three of his supers at once.
Though Gill could technically be unlocked in certain versions of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, he was banned from competitive play. Indeed, he was way better than the rest of the cast.
When Gill was added to Street Fighter 5, he was completely reworked compared to his previous iteration. Funnily enough, Gill was generally considered to be a low tier in Street Fighter 5. He was even outshined by his supposedly weaker brother, Urien, in that game.
Generally speaking though, even when developers nerfed bosses to be usable by humans, they often ended up still being a little strong. Of course, there were also times that players were able to get access to boss characters without any reductions. When this happened, they were almost always banned from competitive play.
Check it all out in the video below: