While stumbling around youtube to find various mario paint versions of my favorite game songs, I happened to notice that I was running into a lot of random fighting game videos. I’m not talking about your standard Mortal Kombat supreme demonstration. I’m talking about Peter Griffin fighting the green power ranger. Or Ronald McDonald versus Haruhi Suzumiya. A lot of times it was on a Street Fighter or Darkstalkers background I recognized. Othertimes, in the case of Ronald McDonald, it was outside a burger king. I guess the King decided the best way to liven up his restaurants after that whopper debacle was to bring in some good old bloodsports.

In every video the word MUGEN was a keyword. At first I was confused and thought people were just tagging things after that samurai from Samurai Champloo to get more views. After it dawned on me that I was an idiot, I actually started looking into what M.U.G.E.N is.

Though I couldn’t tell you what MUGEN actually stands for, and the technical specs are something I somewhat glossed over, I can give a brief overview.

MUGEN is a fighting game engine designed by the company Elecbyte. They seem to have since lost the license to it and have faded out of existence entirely. This has caused some serious problems with distribution, considering that without a license it’s pretty much illegal to download it or give it out. Because of that, I’m not even going to begin to go into how to get MUGEN here. Not even going to give any hints. Sorry guys. This is one of those ‘look but don’t touch’ scenarios.

While outwardly MUGEN looks kind of like a shitty C++ program, it’s incredibly customizable. People add their own original sprites into the game and animate them, add sounds, whatever. Backgrounds can also be added, along with music. The artist in me smiles with glee at the idea of being able to create and animate my own sprites for a fighting game, especially in pixelated form. But I guess not everyone would enjoy hunching over an editor and slowly zooming and coloring with a 24 color palette. But that’s okay!

The best part about it, really, is seeing your favorite fighters play against other characters they would otherwise come nowhere near. Morrigan fighting Tifa? Hell yeah! But man, someone should really update Morrigan’s sprite. Capcom has been using the same one since the 90’s and it really shows. I mean, seriously? Even Mega Man got an update in the later Marvel vs. Capcom games. Even freakin’ Roll did.

Sorry, slight tangent there. Like I said earlier, MUGEN is fun to look at but no touchy. There’s a lot of issues with legality due to the fact that, first of all, the actual engine license is gone so distribution is a no-no. Secondly, in order to create custom sprites or add other characters into your game, you have to directly rip their moves, sounds, pixels, whatever, and stick them into your game. Another no-no.

I wanted to get more into the specs and what types of OS can run it, but that comes dangerously close to encouraging pirating, which I won’t do. The best thing I can tell people to do is to youtube videos. They’re actually pretty hilarious and worth it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Classic Gaming, Game Design, Character Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.