Fighting Games Have Basically Always Been Multiverse Stories
Long before Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield portaled into the MCU, Super Smash Bros. brought characters from different universes together. Though Mario, Link, Nes, and Captain Falcon existed in their own worlds, through the sheer power of Nintendo owning the rights to them all, they could be smashed together on one small stage and forced to do battle until even the gentlest flick from a paper fan could send them flying like a Babe Ruth homerun ball.
Decades before Marvel and Warner Bros. realized there were wheelbarrows of money to make by putting unrelated characters together in one piece of media, fighting games like Super Smash Bros., Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, and X-Men vs. Street Fighter (which eventually became Marvel vs. Capcom) were bringing characters together for a few rounds of fisticuffs.
RELATED: I'm Already Sick Of The Multiverse
Though J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009) was likely the first time many people began thinking about the concept of the multiverse, gamers had intuitively understood its implications since the '90s. X-Men vs. Capcom paired the two rosters against each other in 1996, Smash Bros. brought Nintendo's mightiest heroes into competition in 1999, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe put blood on Batman's knuckles in 2008, and now, in 2022, MultiVersus is slamming all of Warner Bros. best brawlers together for a ride in the Mystery Machine. MultiVersus isn't doing anything new, but it’s the first fighting game to put the concept of how it's all happening right in the title. While in the '90s, it was exciting to see two worlds collide; in the '20s we're focused on how and why they collide.
Nintendo offered an answer via the way it framed the Super Smash Bros. series, with the characters shown as
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