X-Men: Children of the Atom

Overview

Wolverine’s first arcade attack is a claw rush that crosses the screen. Storm’s super combo fills the air with lightning. Colossus’s landing shakes the ground.

Capcom’s first Marvel fighting game understood what these characters were supposed to feel like.

The Origin Point

Every mechanic in Marvel vs. Capcom 2’s 56-character infinity began here. Super jumps — pressing up twice to launch into the elevated aerial space above the normal play area. Aerial combos — chaining attacks at super jump height to keep the opponent airborne. Hyper Combos — three-level super moves with screen-filling effects proportionate to the power being depicted.

Children of the Atom invented the vocabulary. Every subsequent Capcom Marvel game spoke it.

The Jim Lee Era

The designs came from Jim Lee’s 1991-1994 X-Men run — the period when the X-Men sold 8 million copies of a single issue and became the defining mainstream comics of the early 1990s. Cyclops in the blue-and-gold visor. Storm in the white mohawk costume. Wolverine in brown-and-tan.

Capcom rendered these designs in large, detailed sprites — the characters recognizable to anyone who had read the comics or watched the animated series. The visual fidelity to source material was part of why the game worked as an X-Men product rather than a generic fighter with licensed names.

Magneto

The final boss. The field of metal. The superior intellect.

Magneto as an unplayable force of nature — the game treating him as something beyond the roster rather than another character in the select screen. The decision to make him an antagonist rather than a selection created a villain presence appropriate to the character’s status as the X-Men’s most significant antagonist.

He became playable in subsequent games. In Children of the Atom, he was what the X-Men were trying to stop.