Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1994: Part 2

It's still 1994!  Let's goooooo!

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1994: Part 1

If we weren’t there already, we have officially reached the peak of fighting game mania.  With Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Fatal Fury games bringing in the players, more and more companies wanted a piece of the action.  There were more fighting games being made than ever before, be it on consoles or arcades.

They didn’t even stay in the games.  Fighting games were being turned into major multimedia franchises.  Both Fatal Fury and Street Fighter got their own movies this year and Mortal Kombat was on the way to getting one in the following year.

With such a boom, Capcom and SNK upped their arcade production this year, so much so that I need to split it into 2 parts.  It was important that they did because in 1994 there was extremely tough fighting game competition.

Some of the biggest and best fighting games came out in 1994.  Games like Kasumi Ninja, Ballz 3D, Shaq Fu and one of the most highly regarded fighting games even to this day, Rise of the Robots.  There was also this one game called Tekken that Namco made, but who cares about that shit.

Truth be told, I don’t think either company can make a game that can surpass Rise of the Robots, but in the comparison of Capcom and SNK’s arcade games, that doesn’t matter.  Time to see what we got in this crazy, crazy year.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1993

In 1993, the fighting game genre had gone into full swing.  Mortal Kombat 2 came out with even better graphics, more violence and cheating asshole computer opponents.  Home ports of arcade games like it and Street Fighter 2 were topping the sales charts and other companies got in on the fighting action themselves, like Data East with Fighter’s History and Konami with TMNT: Tournament Fighter.

1993 was also a big year for 3D gaming.  The PC megahit Myst came out with its 3D pre-rendered backgrounds and full motion video, while on the console side, Nintendo made Star Fox, a game able to render polygons on a Super Nintendo cart.  For fighting games, Sega topped off the year by revolutionizing the genre by adding a 3D element with Virtua Fighter.  It was a year of major technological advancements for the medium of gaming.

I have to admit, 3D models having faces is pretty impressive too.

For arcades, one of the biggest technological advancements came with Capcom's new arcade hardware.  One that could, in some ways, even surpass the Neogeo: the CPS2 board!  This new technology would allow for more and bigger sprites, more colors and even better audio thanks to QSound technology (though Qsound was used in a less-used CPS1 variant called the CPS Dash).

Though 3D fighting would blow up in the coming years in large part due to Virtua Fighter, Capcom and SNK were still sticking with what they had in two dimensions, albeit with less releases this time.  In fact, this year Capcom only has 3 games to work with.  Even still, there’s a direct point of comparison with two of Capcom’s games.  Both have an updated version of their hit fighting games and, more uniquely, both have a wrestling game.

Let’s see who gets treated like Roman Reigns and who gets treated like John Cena!

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1992: Part 2

Continuing on from part 1, there's a lot more fighting games to close off the year and that's a train that isn't going to stop rolling for a long time.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1992: Part 1

1991 started the era of the fighting game.  With some precendent established, 1992 had both companies start to pick up momentum on the craze Street Fighter 2 and Fatal Fury started the previous year and expand on what they could do with this new genre of games, all the while pumping out the sports, shoot-em-ups and beat-em-ups that had by this point proven to be a safe bet.  At least, SNK was pumping out the other games.

Something you’ll notice about this year is that Capcom’s arcade production is dwarfed by SNK’s.  This year I’ll be looking at 10 SNK games and only 5 Capcom games, 2 of which are Street Fighter 2 reversions.  It’s as if they put so much effort into their big monster hit Street Fighter 2 that they didn’t give as much attention to the rest of them.  Their continued home console development might have played a part too, I suppose, which includes a Super Nintendo port of Street Fighter 2 that made absolute gangbusters.

This was also the year Midway got into the fighting game genre with the first Mortal Kombat, starting a legacy that would last a lifetime, but let's not make this a 3-way battle.

What else happened in 1992?  Well, there was some cartoon that revolutionized television animation and continues to get merchandise and high praise even 30 years later, but nothing important.

There are so many games (from SNK) this time that it will be split into 2 parts.