How come they never made a Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter game? Would you want that game?

Just curious. I get that Mortal Kombat is much more violent, and Street Fighter isn't that, but SF and MK have been, and maybe can still be considered the biggest fighting franchises to date. I think it'd be a pretty cool game and something fighting game enthusiasts would enjoy immensely if done right. I was just reading that Ed Boon said in the past that if Capcom had approached them, he'd think about it, but thought it wouldn't satisfy everyone. If it ever happened, would you be into it, and how would you like it to be presented? While I am interested in the idea and think it'd be super cool, I, in all honesty, don't even really play fighting games anymore. My brother buys them, and I might play a little bit of it, but I hardly ever play them for more than an hour before moving onto something else. Fighting games are, however, the first genre of video games I got into getting good at though at a young age and was my leap from action figures into gaming.

I'm not incredibly familiar with crossover fighting games but my understanding has always been that the primary hurdle with this game is the fact that MK is balanced for a block button and SF is not. MK has only done crossovers with previously untouched properties and thus can easily implement the block button into those characters, while SF has only ever crossed over with games that back-to-block instead.

Maybe on paper it sounds like a not-that-big-a-deal thing, but to me it sounds like a fundamentally different programming solution.

I like Street Fighter.

I like Mortal Kombat.

I don’t need them together.

Fighting styles aside, MK kinda needs to be a hard M rating. It’s a key component. While I’d like to see a dirtied-up, less anime Street Fighter, I just don’t see Capcom doing that.

As far as the fighting, they’re closer in play-style than they’ve ever been, but they’re still very different games.

Ed’s right in that it probably wouldn’t satisfy enough fans, but I’d be interested to see someone try.

Mortal Kombat's more casual focus doesn't mesh well with SF's depth I guess? But I'm no expert and maybe weird crossovers have happened before

If Sonic and Mario can do Olympics games together, never say never on MK x SF.

As long as it played like Street Fighter, yeah I would love that.

I think because the themes of each are very different. I can see something like Street Fighter x Tekken, where its just Tekken dudes in Street Fighter, but I think the real business hurdle is there isn't really anything in it for either studio. I don't think Capcom would be happy seeing Mortal Kombat characters murdering their characters, and I don't think a bloodless/fatality-less game with Mortal Kombat dudes has any appeal.

I think the bit you read about Boon's feelings is basically what I'm saying. Its not an inherently bad idea, but what the fans of each game want isn't really gonna be fulfilled, so there isn't really a good business reason to do it.

Would fans really be mad if Ryu got his head decapitated, or the block mechanic was just put to pressing back as opposed to a button press? Maybe, in the game, the style can be changed. So, if you prefer SF, you can have it be more akin to that, if you like MK, you can have it similar to that. I get that Capcom might see it as something they don't want with all the gore (although, they do have some violent games themselves... and could do it just for fun and the new change that hasn't been done before), but I think a lot of people would see it as just awkward, but not bad.

Because nobody in Japan gives half a shit about Mortal Kombat. WB didn't even bother releasing the last couple MK games there.

i bet there's still a western / eastern divide that's harder to bridge than Sonic & Mario ending up at the Olympics. Sure, those were huge rivals back in the day, but now Sonic games show up on Nintendo hardware and they're just another dev they can meet up with in Tokyo and collaborate with to make a game.

Even a merged company like Square-Enix still feels like it's very divided between the japanese branch making the RPG's while the western division makes the real time action games.

Do you remember Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe? It wasn't an awful game inherently, but it was dull for a Mortal Kombat game and violent for a DC game, so the thing they found in the middle ended up being sort of just dully average. The best bit about it was that it was more like old Mortal Kombat, because the last few of those games were really disappointing.

Making it so there were two functional combat systems (if I read your comment correctly?) is essentially making two full games. Going back to Street Fighter X Tekken, it has both, but its a Street Fighter game, hopefully with a Tekken version coming out later. Games aren't cheap to make, and building a game twice would end up splitting one game's budget across two games.

But I really think the business is the actual killer of any real chance of it actually happening. The reason you do a crossover is to court both audiences, get double the interest and hopefully double the sales. That's why you would take the risk of mashing the two together. But even within this thread,

and then it loses me. If it played like Mortal Kombat, I'd be in, but I don't really like Street Fighter enough to spend the money on a game I know I'm not gonna play. So even within our extremely small sample set, we only have half the purchases out of the theoretical audience.

In all honesty, I don't really see any reason for NetherRealm to not develop it, because as much as I like the Mortal Kombat characters, most of their personality is in the violence and the fatalaties (and friendships and beastalities and babealities, etc.) and the weird hidden stuff that they cram in there. Making the effort to put them into a Street Fighter game would only really expose that the Mortal Kombat system is much more simple and that those characters don't have much left to them without the violence. So if NetherRealm develops it, then they need to cram the more complex Street Fighter system into Mortal Kombat, as well as find some happy medium that isn't tearing Ryu in half and having M. Bison stomp someone to a bloody mess.

But let's say Capcom does a very un-Capcom thing and gives NetherRealm carte blanche, do whatever and pay us a big licensing fee and go to town. It's got a the freedom to be edgy and dumb, but is going to be very different than Street Fighter because NetherRealm is making it, so it's going to lose those fans. Its going to have less of a budget, because of the licensing fee that they need to pay Capcom, so at least its going to be a smaller thing than most Mortal Kombat games, but also needs to be full price because they need to make their money back, which is going to dissapoint a lot of Mortal Kombat fans who like the weird business they cram into the edges of those games. So the only people who are left are the Diehard Mortal Kombat fans who are down to just buy anything that NetherRealm creates. So they do a ton of work to mash the franchises together for less of the return on investment of a normal Mortal Kombat game.

As a theoretical, it totally makes sense. Throw em in Mugen and let the sparks fly. But as an actual business venture? In an already crowded market, a middling game that only makes one audience happy isn't a great idea. Fighting EX Layer is on the sort of the scale of final product I imagine, and that's doing not abysmally, but not tearing up the charts either. It's hard to defend doing all the business footwork to produce a middling return on investment.

Sorry for the short novel, but that's how I see it at least.

How quickly people forget SF X Tekken. If THOSE two games' gameplay can meet in the middle, MK and SF aren't that big of a longshot. It's not about transplanting the characters directly, it's about adapting them.

I think it's much more an interest thing: Mortal Kombat simply isn't that popular in Japan. And while sales would likely still do fantastically just on name recognition alone, if you can't get Capcom to care, they're not gonna do it. Just look how long it took them to come out with a new, proper Mega Man game, despite a decent amount of demand. They didn't care, so it didn't happen. I think the dream is dead. MK9 and SF4 would have been the time.

@undeadpool: There’s a reason that Street Fighter X Tekken was quickly forgotten, though.

The latest Tekken might be a better example. Akuma worked for the fiction, style and game controls. It was pretty cool. Frankly, I could have seen Scorpion playing the same avenging warrior role and playing fine in Tekken as well. Having Ryu appear to fight Akuma in some side story content could have worked, too.

I can’t see Street Fighter and MK working nearly as well, but crazier things have happened.

I like Street Fighter a lot and I can't stand MK, so I'd be bummed to have a game where I don't give a shit about half the roster from the get-go. I guess it'd be cool for the people who enjoy both, but that's not me. I feel like MK is a mostly US thing, but a quick search didn't give me any numbers of what the actual sales are like in all territories. However, if the vibe in Japan is anything like it is where I live, then MK is a fighting game Someone Else cares about, and I dunno why Capcom would go that route compared to co-operating with the people they already know in Japan. I think that's why we got Street Fighter X Tekken(and earlier, Capcom vs SNK) instead of SF X MK, despite say the staff on this site being way more into MK9 than Tekken at the time.

I think it's been more fun to see Ryu in Smash and Akuma in Tekken, as well as marvel vs capcom, than the SF X Tekken crossover even. The Bombcast keep talking about capcom making a Capcom VS Capcom game, which I could get down with. They have a pretty distinct house style which many of their characters fall into. I'd rather see that than have them cross over with pretty much anyone else, the same way Nintendo does Smash Brothers.

(which granted, Smash now has a dozen crossover characters, but the overwhelming majority are still Nintendo dudes)

@nutter: Street Fighter VS Mortal Kombat has been an idea/request of plenty of fans LONG before Street Fighter X Tekken bombed. The reason so many people seem to want it is because the two games were contemporaries of one another, at least Street Fighter II was. And I think narratively, MK is too out there for Tekken, and yes I understand how silly that sounds, but it's much more Hell and sorcerery while Tekken is technology with some magic dusting it.

It took me over a decade of living in the States to realize ppl liked MK for real and not ironically in a jokey way so I don't really know how WB or NetherRealm would get Capcom to even entertain the idea. I guess money talks but fighting games are still popular in Japan and it'd be hard to get ppl excited about it there. I wouldn't want a team of Japanese developers working with an IP that they really don't have the reverence for and NetherRealm will never get to touch SF.

Do I want it?

I've come to appreciate MK but I still scoff at the idea of ranking it near a lot of what I consider to be top tier fighting games. I'm not saying it doesn't deserve to be, I'm saying that bias is that strong so imagine how Japanese fighting game developers might feel.

If it plays like MK then I don't want it.

If it plays like SF but with MK characters in it then sure I guess, but I'm not exactly feeling enthusiastic.

Lots of reasons, but mostly because they are two completely different style of games, both mechanically and tonally. Plus, you'd never be able to have an MK game play like SF and vice versa. Tekken and Street Fighter worked because they are much more similar.

Plus personally, if it played like SF than I want no part of it. I also dont like Street Fighter. Ppl cant hate on Netherrealm all they want, but part of the appeal is that it is so approachable for 'casuals'. The fighting game community is one of the worst sub-communities in the gaming.

Issues of "could they pull it off" aside, the main reason are business reasons. Both Capcom and WB have very little motivation to go through the trouble of licencing and co-producing a crossover game. Whether it was Netherrealm or Capcom that ended up taking control of the game development (sort of when Capcom developed Street Fighter vs Tekken), there would be a lot of red tape associated with adapting other people's characters, which would not be helped by the language, culture and even timezone barriers.

That is in terms of legal issues. I am pretty sure both Ed Boon and Ono-san would be trilled by the opportunity, and they have expressed nothing but respect and admiration for each others work.

@undeadpool: Oh, I cut my teeth on Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat in arcades. I know people have been asking about that forever.

I just would have always said the idea was lunacy on all levels, but Akuma worked in Tekken 7.

This is the correct answer.

Honestly, no, I truly do not want that crossover. as cool as it would be to finally see Liu Kang vs Ryu or Shao Kahn vs M. Bison, the majority of both casts don't really mesh well together. there is a few, don't get me wrong, but it's really only a small percentage of both casts that could make for a good crossover fight. I mean who would you pit against Kung Lao? Reptile? Baraka (don't say Vega, that sucks)? Goro? the Lin Kuei Cyborgs? Sindel? Kenshi? Jade? I mean the list goes on and on, there really isn't a lot of comparisons between the individual characters.

On top of that, the story honestly couldn't be anything more than what they did with MKvDC and seriously, who the hell wants another one of those?

No, Street Fighter's crossover partner, at least from where I sit, has always been Tekken. granted that game was disappointing but on paper that's a really good crossover, the characters line up so much better there; Akuma vs Kazuya, Ryu vs Jin, M. Bison vs Heihachi, Chun Li vs Nina, Dan vs Paul (so want to see that fight), Ken vs Hwoarang, Cammy vs Anna (I think?), there's a lot more there that work a lot better than with MK.

Personally I feel that MK's crossover should absolutely be with Killer Instinct, that's the one I want to see. Liu Kang vs B. Orchid (I'll come back to that in a sec), Kung Lao vs Jago, Scorpion vs Cinder, Sub-Zero vs Glacious, Reptile vs Riptor, Shao Kahn vs Eyedol, Onaga vs Gargos, Kitana vs Kim Wu, Nightwolf vs Chief Thunder, any one of the Lin Kuei Cyborgs vs Fulgore, I mean I could keep going here but this one just makes more sense to me personally. I know there's a bit less of a roster to work with but I still think its a better fit then MKvSF. hell, MKvDC had "Fatality" and "Heroic Brutality", maybe MKvKI could have "Fatality" and "No Mercy" again, "Friendship" and "Humiliation", man that'd be cool.

(Just a small aside, I've seen the whole "Liu Kang vs Ryu" thing many times, and that also doesn't really work given that Ryu is more powerful but Liu Kang has more fighting skill. I'd rather see Liu Kang vs B. Orchid because there its just skill vs skill. and when you think about it, Liu and Orchid actually have a lot of common ground; they both used only their fighting skill to defeat basically godlike enemies (Shao Kahn, Shinnok, Eyedol and Gargos), both can transform into a very powerful animal (the Serpent Dragon and the Firecat), both have a kind of sidekick character they pal around with in Kung Lao and Jago, so that fight would actually be a lot of fun to see in action/play out in the game. so yeah, Liu Kang vs B. Orchid, a much better crossover fight then Liu Kang vs Ryu).

(this whole message took me a bloody hour, I'm beat.....)

@TechnoSyndrome said:

This is the actual reason. Everyone talking about it not being thematically appropriate, or the mechanics of block button/no block button not meshing is crazy. They made Street Fighter X Tekken, for Christ's sakes, so they could figure out Street Fighter X Mortal Kombat mechanically if they needed to. But they won't need to, because the Asian market gives zero fucks about Mortal Kombat, and I doubt that any era of Capcom management has ever seriously considered making this business deal.

@bisonhero: In my defense, I was merely answering the latter part of the OPs question, the "Would I want it" part. as for the former part of it, I suppose it is possible that they don't care about MK. it's a bit hard to tell that considering that the Marvel vs Capcom franchise has been popular for what? 15 years now? 20? I can't remember. and Marvel Comics is primarily a western property and yet Capcom was willing to play ball there so I can imagine them willing to do the same with other western properties. granted MK doesn't have the same fanbase/fan size/crap ton of money as Marvel, but you get my point.

all of that said though, I do remember hearing somewhere that one of the main reasons why Capcom wasn't willing to do this crossover was because they didn't want to see their characters maimed in such brutal ways that MK does with its characters. didn't stop WB from mutilating MKvDC and it's not like Capcom have never put out a game that has similar amounts of brutality in it, but that was the main excuse I heard. no clue whether or not that's even true though, it was a long time ago that I heard that.

For me at this stage, if your aiming to see that type of crossover I'd much rather they hold off and go the entire way with it. Like give me Salty Bet levels of character property crossover. I get the appeal of just a raw Street Fighter X MK, and I think you could easily make something interesting by throwing the almost Hollywood style touch that MK has in it's style on the SF cast. Or hell even if you went the other way and anime'd up MK, but just violent anime. Either could work.

I guess I just see it as pushing down that path of the inevitably of some big nightmarish ultimate crossover fighter of an infinite number of properties.

Marvel is certainly and always was bigger in Japan than MK ever has been. The Japanese live action Spider-Man show influenced a lot of future tokusatsu shows like Super Sentai, and stuff like the X-Men cartoon aired there too.

heh, I actually completely forgot about that live action Spider-Man show back then.

still though, even though Marvel is bigger, I can't see Capcom saying no to an MKvSF game just because MK isn't as big in Japan as Marvel. I mean, frigging RoboCop made it into a Japanese commercial over there and I'd say RoboCop and Mortal Kombat are at least on par in terms of popularity.

seriously, I'm not kidding about that commercial, check it out.

If Japanese companies are using Robocop to advertise their product I would assume that means it's popular, not arbitrarily decide it's just a weird outlier.

...except the 1980s were *30 years* ago. It's a bit of stretch to say "Modern Crossover Fighting Game will work now because a generation ago, there was a completely unrelated crossover between two non-videogame properties." ;)

A rather easy question to answer. The Japanese market simply doesn’t have a great amount of knowledge on Mortal Kombat and if you told Ono that MK is Street Fighter’s arch rival he’d say “I’m sorry, who?” Mortal Kombat has made sound waves in sales in North America and Europe, but never in Japan. It’s a crossover that will do well in select regions and Capcom isn’t eager to crossover with a western fighting game franchise.

Also I don’t think Capcom would want their characters being the performers or victims of bloody fatalities. Even if that happen it might be MK vs DC again where all the fatalities are toned down.

Not to bring back a months old discussion that's likely been done for a while... Everyone is talking about MKvDC and Street Fighter X Tekken and stuff, but everyone seems to have ignored the Injustice Games. Each of them have had at least 1 MK character in them (Scorpion in the first, Sub-Zero in the second) and both were recognizable as themselves and were essentially the same characters as they were in MK, except without Fatalities. In other words, essentially more brutal Street Fighter versions of the characters that are still respectful to Mortal Kombat and still respectful to Scorpion and Sub-Zero. People worldwide seem to like those games, at least well enough to get a sequel and talks of a possible 3rd game, indicating they must be doing something right. If they worked MKvSF more like Injustice it probably would work better than some of the other crossovers mentioned previously. They have some precedent for this with characters like Dark Ryu and Violent Ken, among others.

It wouldn't need to fit into either games timeline (both of which are pretty messy anyways, and both kinda have multiple timelines as well) and could work more as a spin-off with Ryu being more like the Injustice Superman and Ken or an MK character more like the Injustice Batman or whatever. It wouldn't have to follow the same exact story beats as Injustice, but would be cool if it was at least similar. Basically a more brutal but still respectful version of Street Fighter characters.

One aspect I think they could use from things like MKvDC is the small amount of characters, only 11 in total for each side with 4-6 DLC (2-3 for each side) rumored for the longest time, though this games DLC would actually release. So 26-28 characters in total. Most fighting games nowadays have nearly twice that amount.

I realize MK isn't that popular/well known in Japan and such, but, just as one example, Fire Emblem wasn't well known or popular here in the states, yet Marth and Roy were in Smash Bros Melee before America's first Fire Emblem release. Since then Fire Emblem has become a hugely successful and very popular franchise in it's own right here in the States and has consistently been in Smash Bros since then and even increased in number of Smash representatives in the last few years. not enough to overthrow Mario or Zelda or Pokemon, but at least within the top 10 or so popular Nintendo franchises. Why couldn't this have that same effect with MK in Japan?