Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes

Marvel vs. Capcom is the crossover that made the versus series a genre of its own. Two-on-two tag-team fighting with a Marvel roster and a Capcom one, running on CPS-2, and it is louder, faster and less subtle than anything Capcom made before or since.

The twist in this entry is the assist. Instead of a full four-character roster, you pick two fighters and a third appears only as a random assist attack called in with a button press. That single rule changes the match from a strategic tag system into something closer to a rhythm game: your assist is part of your neutral game, its cooldown matters, and its random identity means you build a team around what you got rather than what you wanted. The roster is loud and strange - Ryu, Megaman, Strider Hiryu, Captain America, Wolverine, War Machine, Zangief, Gambit and a handful of joke picks like Roll and Servbot. It is the direct ancestor of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and it remains the purest expression of what the versus series is about.

• ▸Two-on-two tag-team fighting with a random third-character assist
• ▸A roster drawn from Marvel comics and Capcom games
• ▸CPS-2 hardware with some of the largest sprites of its era
• ▸The direct ancestor of Marvel vs. Capcom 2