How the MUGEN community built the ultimate fighting game crossover

The question, “Who would win in a fight?” is the root of many heated debates in the entire history of pop culture. The concept of putting characters from different traits and different media against each other is exciting to discuss. And when it comes to letting fans live up to these arguments, there are a few better shops than fighting games.

Even in a genre known for character-fusing crossovers, there is one two-decade-old game that reigns supreme when it comes to pitting a wide variety of characters against each other. That program is MUGEN, derived from the Japanese word for “infinity”, which is an appropriate name for a program that offers almost no potential for players to create new fighting games and characters.

MUGEN started life just before the turn of the century as a PC-based side-scrolling shoot-’em-up title, created by a small company called Elecbyte. The team originally experimented with making an engine to handle the rigors of so-called shmup games, but found that it simply did not live up to what they had hoped to make. Taking inspiration from a PC Korean Street Fighter 2 hack known as SFIBM, Elecbyte decided to change course from a shooter to a 2D fighting game engine.

The first public MS-DOS beta release of MUGEN came out on July 27, 1999. This early release differs from most fighting games, though, by offering the only “official” character, Kung Fu Man, and a single stage. Everything else, from extra characters to even title-screen art, would have to be provided by the users themselves, often through files shared via internet communities. For the first time, fans of fighting games were not just allowed, however expect create their own fighters and matchups.

Build a game-building community

Although you do not need any program knowledge to get one MUGEN character, the process can still be time consuming, especially if you are creating your custom art. Over the years, fighter-creation software like 2005s Fighter Factory has come up to facilitate this process. With these third-party programs, creators can import the same hand-drawn sprites as images ripped from existing sprite-based games (making good use of the various sprite leaks that have plagued the Internet, even since the late 1990s). With art in hand, Fighter Factory let users tweak values, line up the sprites for animations, and let everything feel right before exporting the generated files to fully animate MUGEN characters.

Players have also tasked themselves with MUGEN’s core logic and gameplay. In the early years, AI was for MUGENThe computer-controlled opponents of the computer were rather simple, akin to a new player simply pushing various tasks with random button and without any coherent strategy. In the decades since the game’s launch, the community has dived deeper into the potential of the program, programmed more robust and complex behaviors for the AI ​​and led to much more exciting and difficult games with the computer.

As MUGEN became more stable and as word of mouth spread, communities continued to expand through the game, bringing makers and players together over the internet. Many coders and artists interested in the game gathered at The Mugen Fighters Guild, a forum that continues to this day.

Engage in polished and professional fighters MUGEN takes a lot of effort and time, and these communities have proven instrumental in facilitating these projects. Hyper Dragonball Z is one particularly polished example of a MUGEN project, filled with expertly done custom sprites and stages that faithfully capture the characters and fights of the show. What started as an April Fool’s Day joke from three makers is now on its fifth version with around 20 characters and tons of custom code work.

Iced, one of the makers of Hyper DBZ and an admin at MugenGuild, said that “games like HDBZ and The Black Heart (another popular MUGEN fanprojekt) push the limits of the engine itself … At the same time you can download the original character of a child created in MSPaint that took him two days to create. And that’s important, too, because that kid who’s made a random MSPaint character can get a taste for pixel art and stay at work, maybe one day create his own full game. “

At this point, MUGEN makers spend a lot of time fighting with old technology, troubleshooting and coding their way around limitations of an annoying engine that no longer receives official updates. For example, one of HDBZ’s standout features, the extravagant finisher scenes, were not originally intended to be part of MUGEN.

“Broke and bent”

“We broke the throwing system and bent to make it, modifying the original toolset designed to code short throws so they do things like Goku’s genkidama does, when Frieza calls his army to save the opponent before he threw a giant dead ball and wiped them out, “he said. “Such types of coding moves are quite complex, and we break them down sometimes or they break out unexpectedly, so they took a ton of work … We had a lot of trouble making sure other characters couldn’t get out of there.”

Felipe Xavier de Freitas (aka FXFreitas), the most important sprite artist on the fan project Mega Man X: Fighting Arena, explained just how difficult building a MUGEN character can be. “The most complex [aspect] in my opinion is that almost every piece of content in the game needs to be made from scratch, he said. “The source game is a 2D shooting platform game, so we have to turn everything into a fighting game style, create custom sprites, look for good references or even create our own playstyle for some characters and deal with the limitations of the engine . “

Even using characters from existing games sometimes does not save much effort, Xavier said. Mega Man X4 character Iris, for example, has a limited number of “official” sprites to draw from the original game. To complete the animations for a set of unique moves and attacks of a standard fighting game character, a project artist must create additional sprites from the beginning.

Making sure these new assets match the art style of the original sprites, and can smoothly transition into and out of existing sprites, is no easy process. Even with a character like Zero, who has a large trove of official sprites, MUGEN makers make another point to make brand new moves and sprites unique to their project.