The History of X-Men vs. Street Fighter

The first Versus game, and the port that split in two.

Capcom had already made two Marvel fighting games, X-Men: Children of the Atom in 1994 and Marvel Super Heroes in 1995. X-Men vs. Street Fighter, released in Japanese arcades in September 1996 on the CP System II board, did something neither had tried: it put Marvel's X-Men and Capcom's own Street Fighter cast in the same game, two fighters per side, and let players swap between them in the middle of a match. It is counted as the first game in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.

At home it became two different games. The Sega Saturn port, Japan only, used a bundled 4MB RAM cartridge to reproduce the arcade game almost exactly. The PlayStation port, the only version officially sold in America, cut the animation, cut the tag teams, and was received accordingly. Few games show the 1990s console gap more cleanly than this one game sold two ways.

THE TWO COVERS

Same painting, two very different games

X-Men vs. Street Fighter American PlayStation box art

United States · PlayStation

America never got the Saturn version. This PlayStation box, same cast painting, no tag teams inside, is the box American buyers actually took home.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter Japanese Saturn box with 4MB RAM cartridge banner

Japan · Saturn

The Japanese Saturn box is a wide carton for a reason: the blue band down the side announces the bundled 4MB RAM cartridge the game cannot run without.

HOW IT WAS MADE

Tag teams, super jumps, and a screen filling Hadouken

The roster

Seventeen playable characters. The X-Men sprites were carried over from Children of the Atom, except Rogue, Gambit and Sabretooth, who were new. The Street Fighter sprites came from Street Fighter Alpha 2, and Akuma appears again as a hidden character, as he had in Children of the Atom.

The tag system

Matches are a single round, not best of three. Each player picks two characters with separate life gauges. The waiting partner recovers health off screen, can be tagged in at any moment, and enters automatically when the active fighter falls.

The borrowed systems

From the earlier Marvel games it took the Super Jump, the Aerial Rave air combos, and the Hyper Combo Gauge, spent on Hyper Combos, on the Variable Combination, where both partners attack together, and on the Variable Counter, a block that turns into a tag.

Leveling the field

To stand up to superheroes, the Street Fighter cast was reimagined with exaggerated moves. Ryu's Hadouken became a super version that fills the entire screen. The run ends at Apocalypse, the X-Men villain, who has no partner of his own.

In Japanese arcades the game landed at the top: Game Machine listed it as the most successful arcade game of October 1996. In North America it was only mildly popular at first, then caught on over several months and became a hit.

THE RELEASE

Arcade 1996, Saturn 1997, PlayStation 1998

Arcade

Japan in September 1996, the rest of the world later that year, on Capcom's CP System II board.

Saturn, Japan only

November 27, 1997. The first game announced to support the Saturn's 4MB RAM cartridge, with the cartridge packaged alongside the game. It was never officially released in North America, though some Electronics Boutique stores sold imported copies.

PlayStation

Japan on February 26, 1998, renamed the EX Edition there. North America on June 11, 1998, and Europe in November 1998.

The Saturn version nearly stayed exclusive by design. In November 1996 Capcom announced the home version would be Saturn only, then, facing accusations of favoring the Saturn, said both versions would arrive together and both would be arcade perfect. Only one of them was. Why the Saturn game never crossed the Pacific, and what the cartridge actually did, have their own pages in this wing.

HOW IT WAS RECEIVED

Named scores, split by port

Saturn · Game Informer 9.25/10

Game Informer called the import one of the best arcade conversions ever seen to date, running and looking identical to its arcade counterpart.

Saturn · GameSpot 7.4/10

Jeff Gerstmann praised the sprite animation and background detail, claiming there was no better looking 2D fighter on any console system, while criticizing defense oriented play and recycled Street Fighter music.

Saturn · The rest of the shelf

Edge gave the Saturn game 9/10, Computer and Video Games 9/10, Next Generation four stars out of five, and Sega Saturn Magazine 94 percent.

PlayStation · GameSpot 3.6/10

Gerstmann, reviewing the other port, argued Capcom should never have released the game on PlayStation at all, since the machine clearly could not handle a decent conversion.

PlayStation · The wider verdict

The PlayStation version holds 64 percent on GameRankings. Next Generation gave it one star out of five. Game Informer and IGN, both critical, still called it a solid fighting game on its own terms.

The criticism of the PlayStation port centered on the same two losses everywhere: the removed tag team battles, regarded as the game's defining feature, and frequent, dramatic slowdown that reviewers said threw off the player's timing.

WHAT IT LEFT BEHIND

The Versus series starts here

A sequel, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, followed in 1997, replacing most of the X-Men cast with wider Marvel names and introducing assists to the series. The line that began here became Marvel vs. Capcom, one of the defining fighting series of the next two decades.

The arcade original itself returned in the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics in September 2024, and in Arcade1Up home cabinets from 2020. The two 1990s ports have never been reissued. They survive as a matched pair of evidence: the same game, on the same shelf, showing exactly what a RAM cartridge could save and what its absence cost.

THE QUESTIONS

Asked of this game

The Cartridge

Why did X-Men vs. Street Fighter on Saturn need the 4MB RAM cartridge?

The Missing Tag

Why couldn't the PlayStation X-Men vs. Street Fighter do real tag teams?

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