Fighting games collide in ultimate rumble

The world of entertainment has given us plenty of classic crossover clashes over the years. ESPN brought us Rocky Marciano vs Muhammad Ali, while movies presented both Freddie vs Jason and Alien vs Predator, though sadly the two winners didn’t move on to meet in the final.

Now Capcom is releasing the fighting game Street Fighter X Tekken, the X being “cross” and referring to the crossover rather than the traditional “versus”. That may be a clue that the game will be more about individual characters clashing than a full on factional war, though it may also just be the results of English-Japanese translations.

While few details have been released so far, it will be a Capcom-produced game using characters licensed by Tekken manufacturers Namco, meaning the gameplay will probably be closer to Street Fighter.

To make things really interesting, though, Namco will have a later release named Tekken vs Street Fighter, which in turn looks likely to be Street Fighter characters ported to the Tekken game engine. The two companies have even implied that they will be locked in a genuine competition to produce the better game, which means the industry will be watching sales figures closely.

It’s been confirmed that characters will bring their signature moves to the new games. What isn’t so clear is to what extent designers will make sure both sets of characters are balanced: there’ll certainly be a temptation to sneakily set things up so that the “invading” characters are more likely to lose.

This isn’t the first time characters from the two games have interacted (and I’m not talking about the seamier side of fan fiction). The 2005 PS2 release Namco x Capcom brought together characters from both company’s catalog in a role playing game.