Everyone Vs. Everyone

It took me far too long to hear about this. MUGEN first came out in 1999, and it’s gotten a recent boost in profile from YouTube, but this is exactly the kind of thing most anyone who’s ever comboed a Hurricane Kick into a Dragon Punch or felt the satisfaction of ripping out Johnny Cage’s spine has long fantasized about. Wonder how Ryu would fare against Goro? How about Spider-Man vs. that guy with the dog from Samurai Shodown? Alan Thicke vs. Super Mario?

MUGEN (download), with help from an expansive Internet community of devoted, nostalgic computer nerds, have laid the groundwork for any and every dream bout to finally come true. It’s a 2D fighter game engine, released and later discontinued by a company called Elecbyte. But the geeks took it under their international wings and kept working on it, porting it over to different systems, adding and unlocking all kinds of functions. What MUGEN allows is for anyone of reasonable savvyness to add anything into a 2D fighter game of their own — characters, levels, graphics, sounds. These different elements can be easily shared and installed — if you want to brawl in the Planet Express hanger from Futurama, it’s out there to be downloaded. Get the Leela character while you’re at it, you can pit her against one Homer J. Simpson.

I’ve seen videos on YouTube of character select screens with rosters of over 600. Most of these are fighters ripped from other games; there are dozens of different versions each of the perennial Street Fighter series’ figureheads Ken and Ryu, but also characters from any random, obscure fighter you’ve ever played and all those you haven’t. These are probably relatively easy to put together for someone who knows what they’re doing — just steal all the images and sounds (and possibly even control specifications) from a downloaded ROM, and move them into MUGEN. Requiring much more dedication, I would imagine, would be creating your own character from scratch. That’s why there are fewer of these out there. But “fewer” is a very relative term: plenty do exist.

Finding these disparate pieces to put together isn’t as easy as I’d hoped, though. There just aren’t any big, central MUGEN hubs out there, where you can get your fix of fighters, stages, power bar designs, etc., all in one convenient place. There’re some good already-assembled collections to be found among the bittorrents, many of them more than 1GB in size, so you know they’ve got a lot (the base program is less than 3MB, or 0.3% the size of one of these collections).

And sorry to pull the rug, but I don’t think there actually is an Alan Thicke character out there, though there are several versions of Mario, and there’s a really ridiculous Tom Hanks, so Alan Thicke is a definite potential. As I see it, with the rapid acclimation of our world to computers and the Internet, there’s little reason why this program can’t eventually have a fighter for every single famous person or character ever. laebmada

I’ll end with a few more YouTube examples of what you can do with this beast.

This guy actually put himself into the game:

This one I’ve played. It’s a blast:

Another example of someone stretching the boundaries:

And this one needs no explanation: