Street Fighter vs King of Fighters

The year is 1998. Capcom has released, this year, its arguably most polished—and still considered one of its best entries in the entire Street Fighter series even now, years later—Street Fighter Alpha 3. It's in between the releases of Street Fighter III: Second Impact (1997) and Third Strike (1999). Its vs series has just barely graduated from Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter (1997) to Marvel vs Capcom (1998) which expanded the roster from just Street Fighter characters to include characters from other Capcom franchises like Megaman, etc. That would be greatly expanded in the next game in the series, Marvel vs Capcom 2, but this was the first game that started the real trend of gonzo, spastic, novelty value of having such a tonal dissonance of characters all appearing in a crazy crossover game. Prior to that, the Marvel crossovers had been marginally more serious, and the Street Fighter games themselves obviously so, with a consistent tone and feel throughout. In many ways, 1998 was "peak Street Fighter" for a whole decade, while the franchise lingered under lazy, uninspired efforts, before being revived with Street Fighter IV in 2008.

Meanwhile, SNK also released King of Fighters '98 in 1998, obviously. Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 also came out that year, which although a tremendous game, had already had the spotlight taken from it to migrate to King of Fighters. While here in America, this was never really the case, in many markets in Asia and in South America in particular however, SNK was as popular as Capcom at the 2-D fighters, and the supposed rivalry between the two companies was catnip to games journalists, especially seeing as what even many years later many fans see as two of the best entries in both Street Fighter and King of Fighters came out in 1998. This fact was not lost on people at the time, of course, and both games were covered in the press, often in fact, in the exact same issue. At least one publication, Arcadia, plastered the title Street Fighter vs King of Fighters on its cover, and at least some fans, tantalized by that title, thought that that meant that some kind of actual crossover game was coming, as opposed to the magazine merely reviewing two of the best competing entries from each company in the same issue.

Whether this is literally true or not, this fan and journalist fervor is supposedly what prompted Capcom and SNK people to talk to each other and hammer out the license for what was to become the various Capcom vs SNK (and SNK vs Capcom) series of games. From the get-go, however, this concept was tainted by what was going on in the crazy, spastic Marvel vs Capcom stuff; the idea that we needed to add characters who had no tonal resonance with the others, just because the whole point was throwing everybody in a giant bag of a game and shaking it up until it broke. The Capcom vs SNK games were more serious in most respects than the Marvel vs Capcom game of the same era (2000-2002 or so) when they did finally come out in response to that stimulus in 1998, but for my money, they never quite lived up to the premise and promise of Street Fighter vs King of Fighters described in the headlines.

There are some other titles that qualify as similar in tone, of course, although most of them have already had some kind of crossover of sorts with the two flagship franchises. On Capcom's side, Rival Schools and Final Fight have always been associated with Street Fighter; Sakura appearing in Rival Schools and more recently, Akira appearing in Street Fighter V's final season. Final Fight characters were all over the place in the Alpha series already, and more of them have been more and more integrated into the Street Fighter franchise since. Although going back to 1989 already it was clear that they were going to be the same canon; the crush the car game from Street Fighter II was borrowed from Final Fight, and Final Fight's original title was going to be Street Fighter '89! Darkstalkers is a little more difficult; while the Darkstalkers titles have more or less the same vintage as the Marvel and Alpha games, and are obviously very similar to them in many, many regards, they do have an occasionally more gonzo tone than the Street Fighter games, at least. Although other Darkstalkers characters would fit in more closely with the Street Fighter cast. Curiously, as far as I'm aware, no Darkstalkers or Street Fighter character have actually ever appeared in the same game unless it was explicitly a crossover game (or puzzle fighter or something), however, and there hasn't ever been a Street Fighter vs Darkstalkers type property except for a comic book series published by UDON. I find this observation oddly compelling to noodle on. Some of the Street Fighter characters, especially Akuma, but also maybe Gill and Urien and Rose (and Menat) and more recently G (and Q) have the kind of vibe that would fit quite well in a Darkstalkers game. And with the successful relaunch of Street Fighter again, there's certainly been a call to do something with the Darkstalker characters besides an occasional cameo or cosplay alternate costume from many fans, which so far seem to have been unanswered and unaddressed. Curious and curiouser.

The King of Fighters games were always meant to be crossover games, of course, but they were primarily based around the concept of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting and other similar characters; even characters like the US Sports team, the Psycho Soldiers team or the Ikari Warriors team were remade into a Street Fighter-like character representation. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting characters, of course, were already in that mold. From time to time, characters who were a little more outré have popped up, like Nakoruru being a significant part of the plot of King of Fighters XIV, or some of the weird sub-bosses that showed up in King of Fighters XI, or especially all of the strikers that showed up in King of Fighters 2000. And curiously, a number of their actual bosses have always had a Darkstalkers like vibe too; I mean, what is Mukai and Magaki and Saiki and even Orochi for that matter, if not Darkstalkers in a Street Fighter-like game? The NESTS saga was less supernatural, but that only meant that it much more closely resembled the Street Fighter Alpha games, and later the G-project Street Fighter III stuff.

A few other games merit some mention. The Street Fighter EX games were, of course, Street Fighter games, but they were developed by Arika, and had a reasonably diverse cast of characters that have not appeared in mainline Street Fighter. The reason for this, it appears, is that the rights to those characters remained with Arika all this time, so that even if Capcom wanted to use them (which isn't at all clear that they ever did) they couldn't have without making some kind of new deal with Arika to do so. Arika have not that long ago finally released a new Street Fighter-like fighting game of their own, featuring these characters. Curiously, they made a deal of some kind with SNK so that Terry Bogard appeared in their game, and Skullomania appeared in a strange King of Fighters spin-off. This raises the tantalizing question of including these Arika Street Fighter EX characters in with the Street Fighter and/or SNK characters as certainly plausible. 

There are a few more even more obscure but also tantalizing connections. Data East released a Street Fighter II-like game called Fighters History and Fighters History Dynamite, its sequel or upgraded version. This was released on the Neo Geo and just based on the look and gameplay of it, it's mostly a late Street Fighter II vintage copycat. These characters would fit very well. In fact, Capcom thought that they would fit so well, that they sued Data East for copyright infringement. They lost because of the scenes a faire doctrine, which in fact suggests that Capcom was right in believing that the FHD characters are basically Street Fighter wannabes. Curiously, the rights to use these old Data East characters are currently with SNK, and although they've done precious little with them, they have on occasion had crossovers and cameo appearances, including a FHD character appearing in one of the Maximum Impact King of Fighters 3-D games, and a crossover cellphone game using Fatal Fury and Fighters History characters. I'm not quite sure why they haven't introduced a few of them into their mainline King of Fighters series since they have the rights; maybe it's because they don't know that they'll retain the rights forever and don't want to be stuck unable to sell a title that they've produced. But it'd be pretty fun to see a Fighters History team or two, even if they're DLC "non-canon" characters make an appearance in a King of Fighters game.

A final one I'll note is another Neo Geo game, but one developed by another studio, Visco. This is Breakers and its update Breakers Revenge. For my money, this one is even more overtly Street Fighter II-like (with a handful of Darkstalker nods; I actually think Alsion III is a better manifestation of the mummy concept than Anakaris, for instance) yet it was Data East that got sued.

Both Fighters History and Breakers have cult followings for various reasons; the super solid gameplay of Breakers Revenge, for example, and some of the odd character designs for Fighters History Dynamite. While they are largely forgotten (if they were ever known to begin with) by the mainstream as merely Street Fighter 2 copycats, the fact that they were such clear Street Fighter II copycats, not to mention the occasional cameo of some of the characters in other games of the same type, raises the question of whether or not there's any value in adding a Street Fighter vs Breakers Revenge or vs Fighters History Dynamite angle to this crossover. Probably not, because hardly anyone is asking for it, the characters don't have as much depth or interest for the most part, and frankly just with Street Fighter vs King of Fighters alone you've got too many characters to choose from anyway. But... it remains a tantalizing feature; how do (or at least how can, the Darkstalkers characters, EX characters, Fighters History Dynamite and Breakers Revenge characters somehow get worked in to this massive crossover game that yet somehow still manages to have a consistent feel with characters that all feel like they belong there for the most part, without having bizarre characters that don't belong, like Megaman or Amingo or Phoenix Wright, or other characters that actually have appeared in crossover games? Probably mostly just to provide novelty value for the silliness of the concept of adding them, honestly.

Whew. So, where am I going with this? I don't know yet. I'd like to think that eventually I'll write a big fan fic that crosses over the Street Fighter and King of Fighters characters, with some nods towards Darkstalkers and maybe some of the other titles, but honestly, I'm not really doing anything there and not likely to in the immediate future. I am, however, putting together a more complete list of character on my Google Drive. I already had a list of mainline Street Fighter characters. I needed to add the recently announced Luke to the list, and decided, why not create more tabs and go all out? I've now done the EX characters tab, using all of the EX games, including the various iterations of Street Fighter EX and the two games that Arika published that are not Street Fighter. Next will be Darkstalkers, and then I can turn to the SNK titles. I'm doing that one last because it's by far the biggest and most difficult of them all to do.

UPDATE: I really buckled down and finished the lists after a couple of free hours. The King of Fighters rosters were—as anticipated—the most difficult to do. It also reminded me, actually, that there are a lot of really dumb King of Fighters characters. The developers, going back to the very beginning, really, have a strange fondness for introducing characters with bizarre "Japanese street fashion" outfits, although that's admittedly gotten much worse since Falcoon started working for the company. They also have a really bizarre tendency to like to enter little kids in the game, and there are tons of high schoolers and even younger kids padding out the roster. 

Whatever I do with these characters (including simply playing the games) I will very studiously ignore the worst of these.