The History of Fighters Megamix

The single player game is built as nine courses, from Novice Trial through themed routes such as Girls, Muscle and Dirty Fighters to Bosses and Secrets, six fights and a hidden final opponent each. Completing courses unlocks the hidden cast, the subject of its own page in this wing. Team battles of up to eight characters per side, survival modes at three, seven and fifteen minutes, and a training mode round out a package built for the home first, because the home was the only place it would ever exist.

The record describes a game that met with critical acclaim and strong sales, hailed as one of the Saturn's best. Later assessments have been just as warm about the roster and cooler about the balance: putting two casts together without full rebalancing left some fighters, the Fighting Vipers boss Mahler among them, far stronger than others. As a party game rather than a tournament tool, that imbalance became part of its reputation rather than a flaw in it.

Fighters Megamix arrived in 1996, two years before the first Super Smash Bros., with a platform holder's own cast treated as a shared universe: a Virtua Cop officer, two Sonic the Fighters animals, a Mega Drive hero for hire, and a race car, all playable. The idea that a fighting game could be a celebration of a whole studio, rather than one series, is now an industry standard. On the Saturn, AM2 did it first, as a thank you to the console's owners.

It never left the Saturn in its full form, and Virtua Fighter 3 never reached the console it was previewing. Megamix stands as both things at once: the Saturn's crossover party, and the closest the system ever came to its missing sequel.