Have you ever wondered who is stronger – Pikachu or Bayonetta, who was the grandfather of Dumgaya and will Ezio Auditore cope with the dragon hunt? If so, then you will definitely enjoy video game crossovers. This industry tradition is sometimes absurd, sometimes tortured, but interesting to the audience. We will talk about how developers shuffle universes in this article.
We are a family
Because of copyright overlays, most often we see the intersection of characters in the same series, franchise, or publisher’s legal field. The most famous example, which launched the fashion for casual video game crossovers, is Super Smash Bros., in which Mario, Pikachu, Link, Samus and others came face to face.
The genius of the idea of this game is difficult to overestimate. First, Super Smash Bros. allowed with minimal effort to fill the niche of fighting games that is empty for Nintendo – characters, their stories and features have long been spelled out. Secondly, cult heroes, by their presence alone, attracted players to the title, facilitating promotion. Thirdly, fighting game introduced users to the main Nintendo line.
The success of Super Smash Bros. spawned several sequels and a couple of similar games from competitors. Sony, for example, released almost the same, but much less popular, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale fighting game, which has little to do with modern “royal battles.” In it, you could fight Nathan Drake against Sackboy or Kratos against the Princess of the Glutton.
SEGA was not limited to fighting games alone. Under the names SEGA All-Stars and SEGA Superstars there was a collection of mini-games, a tennis simulator and a racing arcade. In these games, characters of other copyright holders even met. In particular, in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed there were heroes from Team Fortress 2 and Ralph from the cartoon of the same name.
Clash of worlds
Speaking of cartoons: one of the most ambitious and legendary video game crossovers owes its existence to them. The Kingdom Hearts series from Square Enix managed not only to interweave all kinds of Disney products, but also to connect it with Final Fantasy.
According to the plot of the series, the main character travels between worlds, some of which correspond to Disney films, while others are invented specifically for the game – in them you can meet characters from different parts of Final Fantasy. The developers did not want to mix everything too much, so the heroes try to keep secret the existence of other worlds for ordinary inhabitants. Because of this, say, Iris from FFVII cannot drink tea with Rapunzel, but she met with Goofy and Donald Duck.
If we talk exclusively about gaming crossovers, then the first to come to mind is Street Fighter X Tekken. This game did the almost impossible – combined the two most titled fighting games. At the same time, the initial idea of the developers was even more ambitious.
Street Fighter X Tekken was developed by Capcom, so, strictly speaking, it was the usual Street Fighter, for which Tekken fighters were adapted. It may seem to those unfamiliar with fighting games that these two Japanese games are almost identical. In fact, their differences are so noticeable that not one of them has succeeded in ousting a competitor from the market in more than 20 years of struggle.
Crossover made fighting game fans understand what Tekken means with Capcom’s hands. There was only one question left – how would Bandai Namco implement Street Fighter. The answer to it was to be given by Tekken X Street Fighter, but, unfortunately, its development was frozen. What exactly caused this, we did not find out.