Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1988

It’s 1988 and the pop culture swing of the era wasn’t quite over yet, what with Die Hard, Bloodsport and even slasher icon Chucky in Child’s Play all hitting theaters.  Signs of the move into the technological advancement era of the 90s started to trickle in though, as a thing you might have heard of called the internet made its very first official connection and Capcom brought out their new weapon in the fight against SNK: The Capcom CPS.

It's more what you didn't see inside the cabinet that impressed.

The newfound power given by this mighty piece of hardware would allow Capcom to be on the cutting edge, with more and bigger sprites and better, clearer audio to make for gaming experiences not even the 16-bit consoles that would come out a few years later could match.  SNK, meanwhile, hadn’t quite made that leap.  Perhaps bigger doesn’t mean better and SNK can instead eke out a win this year with their charm and game design alone, but it’ll be some stiff competition.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1987

It's 1987 and out competitors are in full swing!  This year we can see the start of Capcom's drift away from the shooty shooty bang bang games that have dominated the arcades, but SNK was still going all-in on the shooting action so I guess you can say they stuck to their guns.  This isn't a competition for who made the most creative and genre-busting games though.  This is for who made the best games.  In other words, who is the year's King of the Arcades and

who's bad?

Well, Data East, but that's not until next year.

Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 1986

1985 was a year of shooty shooty bang bang arcade games and that trend continues with 1986, but perhaps because they were aware of the saturation of such games, this year saw some new innovations.  The question then is who innovated and polished their games the best.

Ikari Warriors(SNK): Ikari Warriors has a lot of the same problems as its run n’ gun contemporaries of this time period, but makes enough significant improvements to make it stand out.  It’s viciously unfair and brutal like the others, but unlike TNK3, the Ikari Warriors can move a little faster and unlike Commando, bullets are bigger and easier to distinguish.  When the enemies thinned out in between impossible to dodge onslaughts of deceptive grenade blast radiuses and hails of endless machine gun fire, there were moments of fun.  Those 5-15 seconds of not dying, dodging bullets while gunning down enemies and the grenade trajectories cooperating gave me dopamine hits that were just frequent enough to keep me going.  It helps that it’s also one of the nicest-looking games yet and there’s only 2 music tracks, but the main one is long enough to make it not feel grating and it’s an impressive bit of music for the time, with the multiple layers and backup drum beat.

SNK vs. Capcom: The King of Arcades: 1985

At last the clash of the century begins.  Capcom and SNK, having already established a portfolio of modest titles, but 1985 is when things start to get heated.  Something you may notice though is that their games of 1985 are very… Shooty.  In fact all of them are either space shooters or military shooters.  It could be a coincidence, but there was also a very shooty movie that came out that same year.

It’s entirely possible that the monster popularity of this shooty movie influenced what games they were wanting to make.  Just a hunch, but regardless of their intentions, what matters here is how good they are, so let’s begin.

SNK vs. Capcom: The King of Arcades: Introduction (1979-1984)

In a truly massive sale from the Humble Bundle, I recently acquired a wealth of classic Capcom arcade titles and before that I had already amassed a wealth of classic SNK arcade titles.  To add to that, I have access to a wealth of various classic arcade titles through a chain of arcades all within driving distance and I have coupons for them to boot.  With such a massive collection at my fingertips, I thought I’d do something fun.

I didn’t get to go to a lot of arcades back in the 90s and when I did, I was such a small kid that I could barely reach the controls.  Even when I could, I couldn’t really appreciate what was going on.  Now that I’m older and more experienced, I’m going back in time to the days of Capcom and SNK’s rivalry.  The days before Sengoku Basara 4 or Mohammed Bin Salman; the simpler times.  Both companies were innovating and making games of all types and genres, but now that I can assess the majority of their catalogues, I can answer the question of which company I would’ve considered the best of their day.

For this series of posts, I’ll be playing through both SNK and Capcom’s arcade games by order of release, year by year, and judge which company made the best games.  For each game I’ll be giving some of my thoughts.  Some brief, but some a little more in-depth as there are a few I have a bit of a history with to tell.  With over 100 of these games to play in total, I won’t be going in-depth on every single one and each one will be judged by how much fun I have, regardless of the time period.