While most “who would win” battles take place in the unfettered realm of the imagination, in 1999 a group of anonymous software developers released a little program called MUGEN that lets you make them a little more real.
At first glance, MUGEN looks like one of the zillions of lousy Street Fighter 2 ripoffs that clogged arcades in the 1990s. But when you start it up, you discover that the game only has one character: a nondescript martial artist named Kung Fu Man. That’s because MUGEN isn’t exactly a game — it’s a construction kit for fighting games, assembling tools to create characters from the ground up. And boy, have people created characters.
With a few free downloads, you can have Peter Griffin face off against Jake from Avatar, or Jake from Adventure Time, or Jake from State Farm. Tens of thousands of MUGEN characters exist, spanning every franchise you can think of. All of the Power Rangers? Sure. All of the Ninja Turtles? Of course. Caillou? There are like eight different versions of Caillou.
You know when you’re arguing “who would win” there’s always someone who tries to bend the rules to get the outcome they want? MUGEN gives these folks their time to shine by letting them make increasingly overpowered characters that can lay waste to your everyday Kung Fu Man without breaking a sweat. The community has a name for these creations: “cheapies.”
It’s pretty easy to make a strong character in a fighting game. Give them powerful, fast, far-reaching attacks and let them cook. And there are plenty of MUGEN characters that fit that description. A Ronald McDonald edit named “Dark Donald” is one of the most notorious, as is the dreaded “Omega Tom Hanks,” who can fill the screen with damaging DVDs of the actor’s famous
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