This Week in Retro: Marvel Super Heroes [1995] (Patreon)

October 24, 1995: Capcom Embraces Marvel to Infinity (and Beyond?)

by Diamond Feit

Let me know if this sounds familiar: There's this thing you like, but which most people just don't care about. It may be popular within its own sphere of influence, but to the majority of people around you, it's either unknown or simply regarded as kind of lame. Maybe it's seen as "kid-friendly," "old-fashioned," or just plain inscrutable without a lifetime of context. But because you care about it, you wish others would too.

I think for Retronauts readers, that thing might have been video games at one point in our lives. Maybe it still is today, depending on your circle of friends. But for me, in the 1980s, it was Marvel Comics. It started when I received a digest version of old Spider-Man comics, but it got serious when I bought a copy of Uncanny X-Men #211, the start of a major crossover story about supervillains hunting mutants. I loved the art, I loved the characters, and I loved how it was more challenging than the kids' cartoons I saw on TV at the time, where the good guys always won but nothing ever really changed.

Once I realized the story took place across not only multiple issues, but separate lines of books, I was enthralled by the notion that all the comic books I saw on the shelf were somehow tangentially related. I started reading The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and Marvel Saga, books that were all about the entirety of Marvel Comics history, just to learn everything I could about the world my favorite characters lived in. Even though both titles were focused on recounting past events, they also made me excited for the future of the superbeings I loved and curious about how they might one day team up or face off against one another.

Even though I wasn't alone in my enthusiasm for Marvel Comics—comic book stores were a common-enough sight at the time—there was something about the way my mother dismissed the entire medium that felt unfair. She'd use the term "joke books" to describe them, which enraged me; just because the word "comic" shares a root with "comedy" didn't make the stories I was so invested in a laughing matter. In the X-Men issue I mentioned above, for example, Magneto makes an implicit Holocaust reference, spelling out the mutant massacre metaphor to the readers—and me.

Jump ahead a few years and I'm in a mall checking out the arcade as video games have largely replaced comic books as my personal obsession… and then, I see it, larger than life: Marvel Super Heroes, a Capcom-made fighting game starring an assortment of characters from the comic books I grew up with, plus a few I had never heard of. But that's okay, because suddenly my childhood obsession that no one else seemed to care about is now a part of my current obsession, and the combination of the two makes both even cooler and seemingly "legit" to my teenage mind.

Marvel Super Heroes is a fighting game, but it's also a lot more than that. By 1995, the genre was well and truly an international sensation, and players weren't lacking for options. There were already fighting games starring monsters, historical figures, and even early 3D polygonal people. What made Marvel Super Heroes stand out wasn't the license—Capcom had released X-Men: Children of the Atom a year earlier—but the fact that it was an actual adaptation of the source material. That's right, Marvel Super Heroes has a "story," but not one told via long cutscenes or text crawls; the lore is baked into the game itself.

Marvel Super Heroes is a loose retelling of The Infinity Gauntlet, a major crossover event from 1991 that saw "mad Titan" Thanos acquire the six Infinity Gems, which granted him complete control over the entire universe. With a snap of his fingers, he wiped out half of all life in the universe, prompting the (remaining) superheroes of Earth to travel into space to fight him alongside the cosmic elementals—incarnations of concepts like Order and Chaos—who were understandably put out by this massive disruption. This fits the format of a fighting game perfectly: Given the stakes, all the characters have ample motivation to acquire all the gems and stop Thanos, even the "evil" ones.

In Marvel Super Heroes, the six gems appear as in-game items that players can control and steal from each other during combat. If activated, each gem has a distinct effect: Power adds offensive strength, Space adds defensive strength, Soul restores the life bar, and so on. Each character also has a unique relationship with one gem in particular, e.g. Magneto gains a shield and becomes nigh invulnerable with the Space gem, while Shuma-Gorath gains the ability to petrify his opponent with the Time gem. In a single-player game, all the gems are collected as the player fights their way towards a showdown against Thanos, who immediately steals all the gems back before the final battle.

Even if you're not a comic book reader or missed out on Marvel Super Heroes, all of this likely sounds familiar, as it has since been translated into our mass culture via the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame made more than $2 billion apiece in movie theaters around the world, back when that was a common pastime for many humans. But in 1995, this was the height of nerd-dom: A Japanese video game adapting an American comic book. I hadn't actually read the source material at the time, but I was still completely sold on the concept. For the record, I have since read the original text and highly recommend it: Neither this game nor the blockbuster movies convey the strangeness of the cosmic-level antics Thanos gets up to in the comics.

Looking back on its legacy 25 years later, Marvel Super Heroes looks to be an outlier. It was neither the first nor the last of its series, and every character in the game would eventually reappear in the hugely popular Marvel vs. Capcom series. In 2012, much to my surprise, it was remastered in HD and sold alongside the first Marvel vs. Capcom game in a bundle called Marvel vs Capcom: Origins. It has since been delisted for reasons unknown, although I know it's trapped on at least one of my PlayStation 3 consoles.

I must object to this manner of framing, however. To overlook Marvel Super Heroes as a mere stepping stone towards Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (which is exactly how Origins was marketed) discounts the effort that was made to tie the game to an actual comic book storyline. I know how that sounds silly—fighting game "stories" are usually paper-thin, if they are present at all—but fusing a far-out narrative about all-powerful rocks into the gameplay itself was a very clever choice, and it's something that no other game in the series even attempted… well, it's in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, but that's another story altogether.

To tie it all together: Today, in 2020, Marvel is huge. Not just the characters, but the name itself holds massive appeal. Here in Japan, I see it emblazoned on everything from apparel to change purses; I own a Marvel bento box that is simply all-black with a red logo and features no artwork whatsoever. Capcom is also huge, having survived the tumultuous ’90s and ’00s to emerge as a publishing powerhouse that dwarfs nearly every other Japanese developer from the 1980s. All that talk in the opening about feeling like the thing that I like isn't actually popular? It is ancient history… sort of.

What's happened instead is that the thing I liked transformed into an "identity" or a "lifestyle," which I find unrecognizable. The Marvel Universe as I knew it has been reset or rebooted many times over, and few characters seem capable of supporting their own books anymore—or else they have so many books, it's impossible to keep track. And Capcom makes massive video games, but each one now has to make X-billion yen or it's scrapped forever (see: Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, which has not been updated in two years). So please forgive me if, today, I remember 1995 with fondness: A time when no one outside of a comic book store knew who Thanos was, but those who did know him realized he was a deeply uncool weirdo.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.