Why Did X-Men vs. Street Fighter on Saturn Need the 4MB RAM Cartridge?

Because a tag team is four fighters, not two.

The short answer is arithmetic. A normal fighting game holds two characters in memory. X-Men vs. Street Fighter holds four: the two fighters on screen and both partners waiting off screen, each with a full set of animation frames, ready to enter in a single button press with no load and no pause. Add the backgrounds and the effects, and the arcade game's data simply did not fit in the Saturn's built in memory. Capcom's answer was to put the missing memory in the box.

This page is about this game's Saturn port specifically: what the cartridge held, what it bought, and what its existence cost the game outside Japan.

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.

WHAT THE CARTRIDGE BOUGHT

The whole arcade game, intact

The first of its kind

The Saturn port, released in Japan on November 27, 1997, was the first game announced to support the Saturn's 4MB RAM cartridge. The cartridge was packaged alongside the game, so every copy of the game came with the hardware it required.

Full animation

With the cartridge, the port kept the arcade game's frames of animation. Reviewers of the import singled out the sprite animation, the background detail, the fast loading times, and the absence of slowdown.

Real tag teams

Most importantly, it kept the defining system: two characters per side, tagged in and out at will, the resting partner recovering health off screen. Nothing had to be redesigned around the memory, because the memory had been added.

The verdict at the time

Game Informer called it one of the best arcade conversions ever seen to date. Next Generation treated the result as a preview of what the next console generation would do as standard.

WHAT THE CARTRIDGE COST

A Japan only release

The cartridge that saved the port also fenced it in. Capcom USA said the game would eventually come out in the United States, but Sega decided not to manufacture the 4MB RAM cartridge in the US, which presented a major obstacle to the release. Major American retailers were by then announcing they would clear out Saturn stock entirely in the second quarter of 1998, casting further doubt on the launch. The Saturn version was never officially released in North America; imported copies were sold at certain Electronics Boutique locations.

Europe took a different path to the same end. Capcom's usual European publisher, Virgin Interactive, was reluctant to release Capcom's Saturn games using the 4MB cartridge because of the prohibitive cost of manufacturing it. Sega licensed the game from Capcom intending to release it in Europe bundled with the cartridge, and those plans were eventually shelved.

What players outside Japan got instead was the PlayStation version, which solved the same memory problem the opposite way, by removing the tag teams. That trade is the subject of its own page in this wing.

The full story: The History of X-Men vs. Street Fighter →

Why Did X-Men vs. Street Fighter on Saturn Need the 4MB RAM Cartridge?

THE TWO COVERS

WHAT THE CARTRIDGE BOUGHT

WHAT THE CARTRIDGE COST

THE FIRST WORD