This Week in Retro: SNK Vs. Capcom [2000]

August 13, 2000: Capcom & SNK! Fighting Together! Mass Hysteria!

by Diamond Feit

Media conglomeration has done irreparable damage to our society as a whole, but one of the lesser-discussed impacts is the erasure of what used to be a very special event: The crossover. Once upon a time, if fans were very lucky, two competing companies would agree to bring two disparate-yet-similar brands together for a special event. When I was a kid, it was a miracle when Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons intermixed in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? When I was a teenager, I was shocked when DC and Marvel joined forces to create Amalgam Comics. And when I was a young adult, twenty years ago this week, I was besides myself when Capcom agreed to fight it out with SNK.

For fighting game fans in the 1990s, Street Fighter II was a juggernaut that could not be stopped. The game had breathed new life into arcades around the world, it had been adapted for both the big screen and small, and the characters were instant pop-culture icons. What began as a single sequel in 1991 was, by decade's end, an entire genre unto itself.

Capcom was hardly the only game in town, however, and I mean that literally. A few kilometers from their Osaka headquarters, competing video game company SNK had set up its own shop. SNK created niche products compared to the mainstream appeal of Capcom's work (SNK's devotion to their own unique arcade/home console made certain of that), but the video games they produced were of an unquestionable caliber, and their fighting games were packed with memorable characters—so much so that SNK created their own internal crossover when they launched The King of Fighters in 1994. By the time Capcom had Ryu and Chun-Li fighting with the X-Men in 1996, fans were already wondering when the two real-life rivals would come together for an all-Osaka brawl.

It took about three years to bring Capcom and SNK together, and the showdown began not in the arcades but on SNK's own handheld system, the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Their first collaboration wasn't even a fighting game but, as dictated by portable trends of the era, a card-based combat game called SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash. Mere months later, a proper one-on-one fighting game emerged with SNK vs Capcom: Match of the Millennium, featuring characters from both companies... although that being a Neo Geo Pocket game, they all look like kids with big heads.

After SNK's opening salvo of handheld releases, Capcom handled development of the proper arcade incarnation that was Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000. Do you sense a pattern in the naming conventions emerging here? From the game's opening cinema, it is clear this battle is being treated as the most important fighting game to ever exist: A match for the ages. Screenshots of Capcom and SNK games slide across the screen while the "camera" hurtles through space towards Earth, eventually landing in a giant stadium (sadly, despite both companies' Osakan roots, the stadium is located in Japan's eastern Kanto region).

The first thing a player does when starting a game of Capcom vs SNK is to select a "groove." Given the game's status as a crossover between two different companies, selecting "Capcom" or "SNK" determines how the player can charge/use super moves. The "groove" selection also determines which character art is displayed on the select screen; "Capcom" style being the work of Kinu Nishimura and "SNK" style being drawn by Shinkiro (who was a Capcom employee by this point, but only after being the primary artist for the covers of many Neo Geo games in the 1990s).

Despite being a Capcom creation, Capcom vs SNK plays a lot like The King of Fighters with a twist: Players get to freely create a team of fighters, but every character is assigned a "ratio" value from 1 to 4, and there are only four slots available per team. Instead of a rigid 2-vs-2 or 3-vs-3 match, it can be 2-vs-3 or potentially 1-vs-4. Higher ratio characters are stronger than lower ones, but even a squad of weaklings can wear down a boss.

Capcom vs SNK as a concept was nothing short of mind-blowing when first announced, but the game we got didn't quite live up to the hype—not that anything could. The game plays well enough and features a lineup of mostly new 2D sprites, but there doesn't seem to be any celebration of the two incredible legacies which are being united to make this game possible. Instead, there's a sense of boxes being checked, as if just having the game exist at all should be enough for fan elation.

The biggest sign of such thinking is the character roster, which sorely lacks variety. The title of the game may be Capcom vs SNK, but in practice it's more like Street Fighter vs King of Fighters (save for a single Darkstalker and Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown). By this point, Capcom had made multiple VS. outings against Marvel characters that drew from the company's deep bench of personalities, including non-fighting game folks like SonSon and the Servbots. Instead, for this epic arcade clash, Capcom chose to feature the entire original cast of Street Fighter II before tossing in later creations like Sakura and "Evil" Ryu.

Just as Marvel vs Capcom 2 had done earlier that same year, Capcom vs SNK went from arcades to Dreamcast inside of a month. A revised "Pro" edition which added Joe Higashi and Dan Hibiki appeared in arcades the following summer; this version also got a home console release, which I remember scoffing at for its inclusion of a mere two additional fighters. I knew the arcade business in the 21st century was a shadow of what it had been only five years earlier, but I still had hoped that a collaboration between Capcom and SNK would produce more than a couple handheld offerings and a single arcade game released twice, but that's what we got.

...at least until Capcom vs SNK 2 fixed everything—but that's another story!