September 1996: Nature Vs. Nurture
by Diamond Feit
In Street Fighter and Street Fighter II, Capcom laid the foundation of the modern fighting game. A lot has changed in the decades since those formative works debuted, yet so much of what Takashi Nishiyama, Akira Nishitani, Akira \"Akiman\" Yasuda, and others came up with remains relevant in the genre to this day.
However, there is one core element which millions of players took for granted at the time that deserves a closer look: How exactly do the so-called martial artists of Street Fighter perform the extraordinary feats that they do? I can overlook everyone's ability to jump nine feet into the air and endure ruthless amounts of physical punishment round after round, but it's high time we examined why these people can create blasts of pure energy simply by waving their hands together.
Of course I know the real answer: Capcom's development staff borrowed elements from manga and motion pictures to grant their roster of pugilists a fabulous array of memorable techniques to use in battle. Nevermind that yoga won't let you stretch your limbs or growing up in the Amazon won't turn your skin green, players enjoyed feeding coins into the slot and mashing buttons to see those things happen.
Yet I ask this question aloud because eventually Capcom did have to reckon with a situation where their ostensibly human cast of original characters faces off against beings with legitimate superpowers. Not just any beings either but Homo superior\u2014mutants in layman terms\u2014an evolution of our species born with innate access to extraordinary genetic gifts.
30 years ago this month, Capcom paired their famous wandering warriors against a squad from the United States when East met West and two universes collided in hand-to-hand combat (and beyond) with the arcade release of X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
A clash of this magnitude does not occur without precedence, as Capcom and Marvel had a well-established working relationship in the early 90s. The Osaka-based developer/publisher gave Marvel's trigger-happy vigilante The Punisher his own side-scrolling beat-em-up in 1993, one that lets Frank Castle use lethal force as needed to take down gangsters. One year later, one-on-one fighting game X-Men: Children of the Atom utilized voice talent from the then-current X-Men animated series. Capcom followed that with Marvel Super Heroes in 1995 featuring an expanded roster of heroes and villains seeking to topple Thanos and abort his plans to control the all-powerful Infinity Gems.
X-Men and Marvel Super Heroes did well in the United States where fans of the comics and cartoons reveled in seeing their favorite faces in arcades. According to former Capcom staffer Atsushi Tomita on Twitter* however, those games proved a harder sell in Japan due to \"a lack of name recognition and appeal.\" With both parties on either side of the Pacific interested in a sequel, Capcom knew they had to throw their domestic audiences a bone\u2014several bones, even, dressed in karate gear.
As Tomita recalls in the liner notes of a 1996 soundtrack CD, a producer called him in and asked him \"to serve as the main planner and make X-Men 2.\" Along with this promotion, Tomita received a proposed list of characters and one oddity immediately stood out. \"Um, half these guys are from Street Fighter,\" Tomita told the producer, to which he was told \"Yeah, well, that's how it is.\"
Tomita accepted the assignment but recognized that they couldn't use this mixed lineup and get away with calling it X-Men 2. Again on Twitter* Tomita said \"I thought that title was simply untrue, so I made the call to change it to X-Men vs. Street Fighter.\"
Following in the footsteps of Capcom's previous superhero simulators, X-Men vs. Street Fighter is a 2D fighting game with conspicuously tall arenas to accommodate super jumps and air combos. Eight of the 17 playable characters come from the pages of Marvel comics while the rest hail from Capcom's Street Fighter series\u2014specifically the anime-friendly Street Fighter Alpha games.
Fully three-quarters of the roster use pre-existing sprites, a decision that lowered costs and facilitated a shorter development cycle. Composers Yuki Iwai and Yuko Takehara (n\u00e9e Kadota) joke about the production time in the aforementioned CD liner notes, with Iwai declaring it \"record-settingly short.\" Tomita, too, described X-Men vs. Street Fighter as taking \"half the usual time for a Capcom fighting game\" on Twitter.
Newcomers to the fray include Gambit and Rogue, two heroes proposed for the first X-Men game who did not make the cut. The latter's ability to borrow the strengths of her opponents confounded the developers at first, but in X-Men vs. Street Fighter her Power Drain attack grants her one new special move based on whoever she grabs. In practice, it typically grants her a projectile like Ryu's Had\u014dken or M. Bison's Psycho Shot, although she can also imitate Zangief's famed Spinning Piledriver and even Akuma's Raging Demon.
The ultimate foe waiting at the end of an arcade playthrough is Apocalypse, the X-Men's ancient enemy who can control and reshape every molecule in his body. In the game, this manifests as a regular-sized Apocalypse greeting players only to disappear and re-emerge as a massive titan. As Tomita explained on Twitter, \"part of that was to wow the audience but another major reason was to cut down on memory usage.\" Turns out a single jumbo sprite with minimal animation requires less resources than a smaller one with more detail.
I'm burying the lede a bit here as X-Men vs. Street Fighter introduces a major feature that permanently altered Capcom's subsequent superhero titles: Players must pick two characters and defeat two opponents per match. Each fighter comes with their own lifebar and victory only arrives once both get knocked out. Rounds no longer exist; players can swap between partners at any time with the party on standby able to recover some health while idle. The team shares a super meter and, with at least two levels in reserve, can execute a Team Hyper Combo where both combatants jump in and fire off two supers simultaneously.
To keep pace with this newly-expanded ruleset and the real estate it requires, combat in X-Men vs. Street Fighter is overclocked and exaggerated. Long-range attacks fly faster and reach farther. Mobility in the air is just as if not more important than on the ground. A poorly-timed decision or a missed opportunity just might open the door to a devastating reversal that will wipe out an entire character.
The switch from one-on-one to two-on-two necessitated an upgrade for the Street Fighter veterans as their attacks had to be scaled up to maintain parity with the mutants. Hence Dhalsim's Yoga Flame expands from a mere blaze in front of his face to an elongated spray of red-hot liquid. Ryu's trademark Had\u014dken now produces a wave matching his own height, and the Super variant unleashes a full-screen beam attack.
With as many as four characters on screen at any given time, X-Men vs. Street Fighter threatens to overwhelm players with stimuli. The addition of tag team mechanics means keeping an eye on twice as many on-screen gauges as before. Deciding when the time is right to relieve a fatigued fighter or whether to risk keeping up the pressure to potentially KO a weakened opponent will constantly see-saw in your mind as you play.
From the moment I saw screenshots in a magazine I felt personally targeted by X-Men vs. Street Fighter. The Alpha series had already supplanted Street Fighter II as my preferred incarnation of those characters and I deeply enjoyed both of Capcom's Marvel-heavy fighting games\u2014to say nothing of my general enthusiasm for all things X-Men. The iconic handshake between Ryu and Cyclops had me reach into my pockets and get my quarters ready, a \"Shut Up and Take My Money\" moment before Futurama ever existed.
Atsushi Tomita actually has an anecdote about that handshake, calling it \"the best thing I've ever done\" on Twitter. \"When I emphatically explained that Ryu and Cyclops would shake hands at the end,\" Tomita wrote, \"Akiman told me 'Don't put something that good at the end where only a few people can see it. Put it in the attract mode for everybody.' So I did just that.\"
What I didn't realize at the time was just how much X-Men vs. Street Fighter and its subsequent sequels\u2014which we now call the Vs. Series\u2014would alter my perception of Capcom's fighting games. With flashy effects, huge damage, and over-the-top encounters, this crossover franchise tuned our collective brains to expect bigger and better things from the genre. In a way, I believe the excitement of the Alpha series, the Vs. Series, and the Darkstalkers trilogy overdelivered to the point that once Street Fighter III finally arrived, it looked downright ponderous in comparison.
In that sense X-Men vs. Street Fighter underwhelms when viewed 30 years after its release, considering it led directly to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and 3 which offer madcap three-on-three battles. There's even a brand-new spiritual successor as of this writing called Marvel T\u014dkon: Fighting Souls where each player controls up to four heroes at once and every character looks like the star of their very own anime. I can only assume what a child raised on that level of kineticism would think looking at three-decade-old 2D sprites.
I suppose it falls on me as someone who actively remembers that era of arcade games to champion X-Men vs. Street Fighter as both a clever use of existing art assets and a remarkable step forward for the medium. Ryu and Cyclops did more than shake hands and come out fighting, they broke the barrier between their respective assemblies and showed us all that even humble humans can learn to shoot laser beams at one another.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website. To learn more about Apocalypse, please enjoy this clip from X-Men '97 season 2 featuring actor Ross Marquand playing BOTH voice roles (Spoiler warning: a major character dies in this scene).
*Even though these citations come from two different accounts, @tommy_tin & @manpuku_jinja, both demonstrate an association with Atsushi Tomita.
", "contentSnippet": "September 1996: Nature Vs. Nurture\nby Diamond Feit\nIn Street Fighter and Street Fighter II, Capcom laid the foundation of the modern fighting game. A lot has changed in the decades since those formative works debuted, yet so much of what Takashi Nishiyama, Akira Nishitani, Akira \"Akiman\" Yasuda, and others came up with remains relevant in the genre to this day.\nHowever, there is one core element which millions of players took for granted at the time that deserves a closer look: How exactly do the so-called martial artists of Street Fighter perform the extraordinary feats that they do? I can overlook everyone's ability to jump nine feet into the air and endure ruthless amounts of physical punishment round after round, but it's high time we examined why these people can create blasts of pure energy simply by waving their hands together.\nOf course I know the real answer: Capcom's development staff borrowed elements from manga and motion pictures to grant their roster of pugilists a fabulous array of memorable techniques to use in battle. Nevermind that yoga won't let you stretch your limbs or growing up in the Amazon won't turn your skin green, players enjoyed feeding coins into the slot and mashing buttons to see those things happen.\nYet I ask this question aloud because eventually Capcom did have to reckon with a situation where their ostensibly human cast of original characters faces off against beings with legitimate superpowers. Not just any beings either but Homo superior\u2014mutants in layman terms\u2014an evolution of our species born with innate access to extraordinary genetic gifts.\n30 years ago this month, Capcom paired their famous wandering warriors against a squad from the United States when East met West and two universes collided in hand-to-hand combat (and beyond) with the arcade release of X-Men vs. Street Fighter.\nA clash of this magnitude does not occur without precedence, as Capcom and Marvel had a well-established working relationship in the early 90s. The Osaka-based developer/publisher gave Marvel's trigger-happy vigilante The Punisher his own side-scrolling beat-em-up in 1993, one that lets Frank Castle use lethal force as needed to take down gangsters. One year later, one-on-one fighting game X-Men: Children of the Atom utilized voice talent from the then-current X-Men animated series. Capcom followed that with Marvel Super Heroes in 1995 featuring an expanded roster of heroes and villains seeking to topple Thanos and abort his plans to control the all-powerful Infinity Gems.\nX-Men and Marvel Super Heroes did well in the United States where fans of the comics and cartoons reveled in seeing their favorite faces in arcades. According to former Capcom staffer Atsushi Tomita on Twitter* however, those games proved a harder sell in Japan due to \"a lack of name recognition and appeal.\" With both parties on either side of the Pacific interested in a sequel, Capcom knew they had to throw their domestic audiences a bone\u2014several bones, even, dressed in karate gear.\nAs Tomita recalls in the liner notes of a 1996 soundtrack CD, a producer called him in and asked him \"to serve as the main planner and make X-Men 2.\" Along with this promotion, Tomita received a proposed list of characters and one oddity immediately stood out. \"Um, half these guys are from Street Fighter,\" Tomita told the producer, to which he was told \"Yeah, well, that's how it is.\"\nTomita accepted the assignment but recognized that they couldn't use this mixed lineup and get away with calling it X-Men 2. Again on Twitter* Tomita said \"I thought that title was simply untrue, so I made the call to change it to X-Men vs. Street Fighter.\"\nFollowing in the footsteps of Capcom's previous superhero simulators, X-Men vs. Street Fighter is a 2D fighting game with conspicuously tall arenas to accommodate super jumps and air combos. Eight of the 17 playable characters come from the pages of Marvel comics while the rest hail from Capcom's Street Fighter series\u2014specifically the anime-friendly Street Fighter Alpha games.\nFully three-quarters of the roster use pre-existing sprites, a decision that lowered costs and facilitated a shorter development cycle. Composers Yuki Iwai and Yuko Takehara (n\u00e9e Kadota) joke about the production time in the aforementioned CD liner notes, with Iwai declaring it \"record-settingly short.\" Tomita, too, described X-Men vs. Street Fighter as taking \"half the usual time for a Capcom fighting game\" on Twitter.\nNewcomers to the fray include Gambit and Rogue, two heroes proposed for the first X-Men game who did not make the cut. The latter's ability to borrow the strengths of her opponents confounded the developers at first, but in X-Men vs. Street Fighter her Power Drain attack grants her one new special move based on whoever she grabs. In practice, it typically grants her a projectile like Ryu's Had\u014dken or M. Bison's Psycho Shot, although she can also imitate Zangief's famed Spinning Piledriver and even Akuma's Raging Demon.\nThe ultimate foe waiting at the end of an arcade playthrough is Apocalypse, the X-Men's ancient enemy who can control and reshape every molecule in his body. In the game, this manifests as a regular-sized Apocalypse greeting players only to disappear and re-emerge as a massive titan. As Tomita explained on Twitter, \"part of that was to wow the audience but another major reason was to cut down on memory usage.\" Turns out a single jumbo sprite with minimal animation requires less resources than a smaller one with more detail.\nI'm burying the lede a bit here as X-Men vs. Street Fighter introduces a major feature that permanently altered Capcom's subsequent superhero titles: Players must pick two characters and defeat two opponents per match. Each fighter comes with their own lifebar and victory only arrives once both get knocked out. Rounds no longer exist; players can swap between partners at any time with the party on standby able to recover some health while idle. The team shares a super meter and, with at least two levels in reserve, can execute a Team Hyper Combo where both combatants jump in and fire off two supers simultaneously.\nTo keep pace with this newly-expanded ruleset and the real estate it requires, combat in X-Men vs. Street Fighter is overclocked and exaggerated. Long-range attacks fly faster and reach farther. Mobility in the air is just as if not more important than on the ground. A poorly-timed decision or a missed opportunity just might open the door to a devastating reversal that will wipe out an entire character.\nThe switch from one-on-one to two-on-two necessitated an upgrade for the Street Fighter veterans as their attacks had to be scaled up to maintain parity with the mutants. Hence Dhalsim's Yoga Flame expands from a mere blaze in front of his face to an elongated spray of red-hot liquid. Ryu's trademark Had\u014dken now produces a wave matching his own height, and the Super variant unleashes a full-screen beam attack.\nWith as many as four characters on screen at any given time, X-Men vs. Street Fighter threatens to overwhelm players with stimuli. The addition of tag team mechanics means keeping an eye on twice as many on-screen gauges as before. Deciding when the time is right to relieve a fatigued fighter or whether to risk keeping up the pressure to potentially KO a weakened opponent will constantly see-saw in your mind as you play.\nFrom the moment I saw screenshots in a magazine I felt personally targeted by X-Men vs. Street Fighter. The Alpha series had already supplanted Street Fighter II as my preferred incarnation of those characters and I deeply enjoyed both of Capcom's Marvel-heavy fighting games\u2014to say nothing of my general enthusiasm for all things X-Men. The iconic handshake between Ryu and Cyclops had me reach into my pockets and get my quarters ready, a \"Shut Up and Take My Money\" moment before Futurama ever existed.\nAtsushi Tomita actually has an anecdote about that handshake, calling it \"the best thing I've ever done\" on Twitter. \"When I emphatically explained that Ryu and Cyclops would shake hands at the end,\" Tomita wrote, \"Akiman told me 'Don't put something that good at the end where only a few people can see it. Put it in the attract mode for everybody.' So I did just that.\"\nWhat I didn't realize at the time was just how much X-Men vs. Street Fighter and its subsequent sequels\u2014which we now call the Vs. Series\u2014would alter my perception of Capcom's fighting games. With flashy effects, huge damage, and over-the-top encounters, this crossover franchise tuned our collective brains to expect bigger and better things from the genre. In a way, I believe the excitement of the Alpha series, the Vs. Series, and the Darkstalkers trilogy overdelivered to the point that once Street Fighter III finally arrived, it looked downright ponderous in comparison.\nIn that sense X-Men vs. Street Fighter underwhelms when viewed 30 years after its release, considering it led directly to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and 3 which offer madcap three-on-three battles. There's even a brand-new spiritual successor as of this writing called Marvel T\u014dkon: Fighting Souls where each player controls up to four heroes at once and every character looks like the star of their very own anime. I can only assume what a child raised on that level of kineticism would think looking at three-decade-old 2D sprites.\nI suppose it falls on me as someone who actively remembers that era of arcade games to champion X-Men vs. Street Fighter as both a clever use of existing art assets and a remarkable step forward for the medium. Ryu and Cyclops did more than shake hands and come out fighting, they broke the barrier between their respective assemblies and showed us all that even humble humans can learn to shoot laser beams at one another.\nWriter/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website. To learn more about Apocalypse, please enjoy this clip from X-Men '97 season 2 featuring actor Ross Marquand playing BOTH voice roles (Spoiler warning: a major character dies in this scene).\n*Even though these citations come from two different accounts, @tommy_tin & @manpuku_jinja, both demonstrate an association with Atsushi Tomita.", "guid": "168664830", "isoDate": "2026-09-06T11:00:16.000Z", "itunes": { "duration": "923", "image": "https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/168664830/097570f5f68c443db68ec0c3448ac95b/eyJkIjo3MiwiaCI6MzAwMCwic3RyaXBfYWxwaGEiOjEsInciOjMwMDAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-hash=D4vUXrHGh8AkbYO2Ru_5ud1z7xUk_jRuC49Yb5v4qzU%3D" }, "itunes_duration": "0:15:22" }