Get ready for Marvel vs. Capcom’s return with this retro hidden gem

Crossovers reigned at Evo 2024. Some of the best reveals of the entire event included seeing Terry Bogard in Street Fighter 6 for the first time and learning that Lucy from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is coming to Guilty Gear Strive next year. It’s a sign of a healthy genre that video game developers of all kinds want in on. The marquee moment from Evo 2024 that demonstrated this was when SNK, the developer behind series like The King of Fighters and Fatal Fury, shadow-dropped SNK vs. Capcom SVC Chaos.

Released on PC last Saturday and on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on Monday, SVC Chaos is the latest fighting game re-release from Code Mystics that takes an arcade classic and revitalizes it for modern platforms with features like online play and rollback netcode. It’s a well-done double-dip of a somewhat obscure and unloved fighting game, and an amazing primer for another crossover fighter I’m looking forward to later this year: Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics.

Titans spar

During the arcade golden age of the 1990s, genre rivals SNK and Capcom collaborated to finally make crossover fighting games that featured characters from their respective franchises. Capcom developed two Capcom vs. SNK games in 2000 and 2001, while SNK followed up in 2003 with its arcade take on the concept after only producing Neo Geo Pocket games for it prior. That game is SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos.

SVC Chaos is a weird game, and not just because it’s a franchise mishmash. It has a darker tone and color palette than almost all of the SNK and Capcom series included in the collection, as characters like Ryu and Terry are duking it out in heaven across desolate, postapocalyptic stages. This gives the game a distinct look that neither SNK nor Capcom has returned to since. On the gameplay front, it’s a 1v1 fighter in which each character has two health bars; you must deplete your opponent’s to win the fight.

It’s an SNK-style four-button fighter rather than a Capcom-style