April Fools: A fighting gamer's dream has come true as Capcom and Midway have announced a major blockbuster announcement. The two companies have agreed to partner together for Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat on Xbox Live Arcade! While Capcom is hard at work at bringing Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting to Xbox Live, Microsoft has acted as an intermediary in order to bring the two companies together to the negotiating table.
Earlier this year Midway announced that they were in the process to bring Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to Xbox Live Arcade by the end of the year. Major problems arose in Capcom's development of bringing a twitch 2d fighter to Xbox Live; however, along with Microsoft's Xbox Live engineers a recent major breakthrough in the network code was acheived. Because Microsoft had a major role in the development, they owned shared rights to the network code along with Capcom. So, Microsoft approched Midway with this networking code for the recently announced port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Due to the fact that the engineering was done and would save months of development time, Midway agreed to allow Microsoft to comission the two companies for a versus title tentatively named Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat.
Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat, an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive, will feature all of Midway's characters and background stages from their Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 title, while the selection of Capcom's fighters and stages will come from games in the Street Fighter Trilogy. There will of course be the typical hidden characters and all new content not previously available in the earlier titles as well.
Mortal Kombat co-creator and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 lead programmer Ed Boon had this to say about today's announcement.
"We at Midway saw this as a win-win situation for Midway and the fans of the Mortal Kombat series. I know I personally have always wanted to see Sub-Zero and Scorpion face off against Ken and Ryu, but the two companies could never come to any agreement. But now thanks to Microsoft's intervention fans of both games worldwide can battle it out head to head over Xbox Live Arcade."
SFvsMK is currently planned for release around two months after the separate releases of Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for Xbox Live Arcade.
