Looking back, it’s weird how fascinated I used to be when I saw one character appear in another character’s game.
I was delighted when I saw Mario and Link in Donkey Kong Country 2. They were rendered in CG! Next to Sonic’s shoes! They just stood there, but still. Fighter Megamix was like Christmas morning. Mortal Kombat characters in NBA Jam marked everything that’s great about loose licensing standards. Smash Bros. – even in those early days when they were just Nintendo characters – almost seemed scandalous.
Crossovers and guest characters made the games feel alive, like there was this alternate universe where Sonic and Mario spent their free time. Something like that is everywhere now, from Fourteen days
And there weren’t two companies I followed more closely then than Capcom and SNK. Still, there was a clear rivalry there, evident in marketing materials and in-game references to how Capcom appeared to make fun of SNK characters in design Street Fighter Alpha hidden character Dan. So, realistically, it didn’t seem like we’d see these two as a team, and it was quite surprising when they did.
In 1999, SNK partnered with the Neo Geo Pocket Color card game SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash. I remember initially being a little confused as to why SNK would take all of their fighting game characters and throw them into a deck of cards. Superficially, Capcom’s Take – arcade fighting game Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000
Regardless of whether that was true or not, SNK released its game first and got $40 out of my pocket. Although I wasn’t much into card games, I played and played. I loved the extensive character list and the background detail and easter eggs. People tell me it was a decent deck, but I don’t remember much about it. I was there for the IP, and it scratched that itch almost perfectly.
A few days ago, SNK re-released the game on Switch, and almost immediately it started scratching that itch again. It’s different now that it’s less about getting blown away by the crossover and more about nostalgia for the game itself. And the Switch port doesn’t have the same split-version concept or local multiplayer features as it does the original. And it’s not hard to get hold of games using Capcom and SNK’s IP at this point.
But as a snapshot of those early crossover days wrapped around a pretty solid deck of cards, we have something special here. It’s also the second Switch port of SNK’s crossover games, leading many to wonder if this could open the door for Capcom to port its Capcom vs. SNK fighting games to modern consoles next.
