It was gaming’s first true crossover event. XMvSF was so much more than just an X-Men fighting game.

And yes, COTA also blew me away when I first saw it in action, its character animations were truly incredible! But that was merely a good-looking X-Men fighting game.

Capcom had already made two fighting games featuring Marvel Comics characters already, first with X-Men: Children of the Atom (COTA) and then Marvel Super Heroes. Sure, a crossover between the two hottest entities that Capcom had the rights to make games with maybe shouldn’t have come as the biggest surprise in the world. For a media product to be so perfectly attuned to my tastes was implausible, and yet here it was: a shiny new arcade cabinet, radiating sheer awesomeness in all its 90’s glory. The combination of these two properties in particular was literally unbelievable for me, in the truest sense of the word. I LOST MY MUTHAF^CKING MIND! This was the single coolest thing ever to happen in the history of cool things! So image the shock and awe on display when 13-year-old Lucas, both a hardcore X-Men superfan and dedicated SF player, saw an X-Men vs Street Fighter machine at a mall arcade in Ames, Iowa. By the middle of the decade, I was a hardcore SF fan as well. When Street Fighter Alpha came out, I was even more pumped for its overtly anime aesthetic, and really dove into the series’s story and characters (extremely light as they were). I also watched the campy Hollywood disasterpiece starring Van Damme and Raul Julia. I watched and rewatched Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie-which I genuinely believe is a secretly good film and the best video game movie of all time. I dug into SF player guides just to see the artwork.

We of course had SF2, SF2 Turbo, and Super SF2-which I believe was the version I played the most. Street Fighter II on SNES had introduced us to the Fighting Game genre and gotten me immediately hooked. (For a while, I guess Killer Instinct probably would’ve been up there too.) You are watching: X-men vs street fighter snesĪnd if X-Men was my #1 most-loved thing in the mid-90’s, #2 was probably Street Fighter. I only bring this up again to say that X-Men video games were 100% guaranteed to grab attention. It’s genuinely embarrassing how into X-Men I was-I basically wanted to be Gambit. I know I’ve discussed it some in my review of the X-Men game on Genesis, and my review of X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse for SNES, but I was completely obsessed. It’s difficult to properly express how big of an X-Men fan I was in the 90’s.

Snes xmen vs street fighter