Although it seemed nearly impossible just a few years ago, Marvel vs. Capcom is back and doing what fans have been asking about for a decade at this point.
There’s been a lot of talk on the fighting game side for the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics announcement, but now we’ve heard directly from Marvel about the revival now too.
Laura Hathaway, Product Development Manager at Marvel Games, recently appeared on The Official Marvel Podcast where she was asked about how the MvC collection came to be.
While she unfortunately didn’t really delve into any specifics about the how’s and the who’s, she did speak a bit on why the titles are important to fans as well as themselves.
“We have a rich history of making games with Capcom going all the way back to Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and all of those really incredible titles that people remember playing back in the ’90s,” said Hathaway. “We’re always looking for ways to really surprise and hopefully delight our fans. The idea of bringing these games back was always really, really exciting to us, so we’re glad to finally be able to announce it.”
And judging by the fighting game community’s reaction to the reveal, it seems like they succeeded.
She also goes on to talk about the nostalgia factor and giving the classic titles a modern touch up.
“You want to have the thing that hits you right in the nostalgia, but you also want to make sure that you are modernizing and making sure that it’s still fun to play on modern systems. One thing that’s actually a really cool feature that they’re adding to this is a gallery and sound archive, so you can view game design documents, posters, music, and even like all those old instruction documents.”
There’s of course plenty more new features like rollback netcode and lobbies for all games as well as a handy hitbox viewer for Training Mode and one-button specials.
It would be nice to know how exactly the relationship between Capcom and Marvel became seemingly mended again after the failure of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, but perhaps one day we’ll get to hear that full story of how the partnership fell apart and came back together.
One could imagine that maybe someone like fighting game competitor turned game producer Peter “Combofiend” Rosas played a part in pushing to open that line of communication again.
Rosas worked on a number of Capcom projects including MvCI before jumping over to Marvel Games around 2018, but it’s unknown if he had any direct influence over the new Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection considering he left the company at some point over the past year to join Riot Games to become a designer for 2XKO, which is about to receive its first alpha test.
This has also opened the door to conversations about brand new Marvel vs. Capcom titles in the future, but perhaps a Capcom vs. SNK 3 is looking a bit more likely at this point.
We also recently took a look at why the likely reasons why the MvC Fighting Collection is skipping Xbox entirely as well as a native PlayStation 5 release.
The Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection is set to launch on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC at some point in 2024.
