When Marvel and Capcom first collaborated almost 30 years ago now, it was a simple fighting game akin to what Capcom had always made. A fun and satisfying coin-operated arcade game, fitting in with the other arcade games at the time. The first game that they made together was “X-Men vs Street Fighter”, back in 1996 and it laid the groundwork for the sequels and spiritual successors to come. A collaboration between two titans of completely different worlds somehow felt right in the hands of players and became a cult classic as time went on. In fact, it has been almost 30 years since Marvel and Capcom first partnered on a video game entirely!

The first main Marvel vs Capcom game began with Marvel vs Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, which was released in arcades in 1998. The game focused on a lenient combo system and flashy super moves to keep new players interested but experienced players engaged. This began the main focus on Marvel vs Capcom games, and the titles were seen as easy to pick up, easy to mash buttons on, and the games allow even casual players to perform a lot of flashy moves, which feel satisfying to perform.

Over time, the character roster expanded on both sides, to the point where Marvel vs Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes specifically had a massive 56-character roster featuring characters from both companies. Accessibility was the bane of most fighting games at the time, as there was a big skill gap that needed to be crossed to have proper fun with those games.

However, Marvel vs Capcom games had an easily accessible and satisfying feature list. All of these features came together to form the perfect lure for people who otherwise might never have touched a fighting game. Once “Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3” was released in 2011, the community fell in love with the future classic, but it lacked extra content from the original Marvel vs Capcom 3. The fact that its follow-up Marvel vs Capcom Infinite wasn’t quite on par with the past games in quality and presentation also didn’t help matters.

This led to the community keeping it alive and expanding to this day via mods. And there’s a lot of them up to this day!

The Mods

The most common choice of mod is the Palette Swap mod, which is made by Spuaidatab. The Palette Swap mod allowed players to swap an existing character within the game to a custom character, changing the move sets and so on. The downside of this was that it had to replace an existing in game character in order to work, however with recent advancements that will be covered later, this downside has now been negated. Modders worked together with animators and programmers in order to bring more characters to life, including old versions of character move sets from prior games, heavily requested characters and entirely new variants of existing ones.

Maximillian Dood is a huge fighting game YouTuber who has produced a lot of videos regarding the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 modding community and helped to boost the popularity of the game in recent times, showcasing the mods made by the community and so on. As for the character modders themselves, CaliKingz01 is a great example, as he creates many custom characters from other games or Marvel comics including references based on old comics, move sets from previous games and so on. Looking at the most recent addition to his roster as of writing this, Gambit from X-Men, the animations and moves look amazing and fluid to the point of the character looking at home with the original cast. The gameplay balancing and flow are heavily tested and balanced by the community and the total number of characters playable including modded characters is getting close to over 100 now, with the future updates for Clone Engine hopefully allowing for most of them to all be playable at once.

Speaking of the Clone Engine, it is the most recent advancement in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 mods, which is made by Gneiss64 on YouTube. This was the result of tons of work, research and testing in order to reverse engineer the code of the game and allow for the implementation of new features or expansions. The Clone Engine allows for full modifications within the game itself, with the biggest additions being the ability to add characters (rather than replacing existing ones) in secret palette areas, acting like secret characters from the old classic arcade games. The Clone Engine is such a significant mod that it even allows modders to create entirely new story modes or storylines and make them playable within the game themselves.

This mod only got released recently, so the advancement with this tool has only just begun, with so many more ideas to be explored. The game will continue to evolve further and further as more modifications are done, but the insane potential of this mod will mean that the game has plenty more to go in terms of evolution.

Looking at the game overall, Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a modern classic fighting game that has had a breath of new life, with constant updates, mods and fixes done by an insanely dedicated community. The base game had a cult following for years, and when the sequel disappointed them, the community took their beloved game into their own hands. The game still feels like a brand-new release with new updates and DLC being added, to the point where it’s hard to remember that it’s almost 12 years old by now.

The game is available on Steam, a platform that a likely majority of PC gamers are on, with sales happening quite often. All of these mods are mostly or entirely free and easy to access on sites like NexusMods, YouTube descriptions and GameBanana, making the whole process pretty easy to figure out. Whether you’re a fighting game fan who finds combos satisfying, a fan of the Marvel characters and want to see them in action or you just want to learn a cool new fighting game, Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3’s modding scene makes it the already stellar game into a hard option to ignore.