If you’ve ever had conversations with your friends about which fictional character could best who, if you thought that Nintendo’s Smash Brothers games, or Sony’s upcoming PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale let you duke it out in never before possible fights, then you’ve never heard of MUGEN.
Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it. It’s never been in any arcade, and it will never be in any video game store. It’s a freeware fighter that’s available online for download.
Taking a cue from the mash up arcade fighters like Marvel vs Capcom, MUGEN takes things to a whole other level.
First released back in 1999, MUGEN is named from the Japanese word meaning unlimited, and “mugen” certainly describes the roster. Entirely customizable, players are able to create, trade, share, and download their pick of characters. You have your pick from just about any fictionalized character to have ever thrown a punch. Ever. And not just Ever, I mean EVER, ever.
A conservative estimate puts the total amount of available characters in the neighborhood of about 1,600, and that’s probably a rough estimate at best.
Though there are originals, the majority of the characters featured therein are licensed. As such, MUGEN straddles that oh-so-gray area of legality where so much of the internet thrives.
While this does allow for various persons with considerable programming knowledge to go nuts with their designs, it also allows for the game to feature characters who are virtually unbeatable, and completely broken.
Characters come from a VAST array of sources: from anime, comics, long lost arcade games, cartoons, internet memes, movies, everything in between and to the outer limits. They range from reasonable, with classic fighters like Ken and Ryu, Scorpion and Sub-Zero dropping in, to downright absurd and ridiculous, like “Omega Tom Hanks,” or Chuck Norris, who, living up to the multitude of “facts” that once spread across the internet like a web, has the ability to drop a flaming moon on you.
A basic Google search for “MUGEN” will net you about 52 million results, so you’ll have some sifting to do to find a reputable site. Like finding “roms,” you’re sure to come across some shady business, so watch out. But if you’re the kind of person who wondered who would win between a venom-symbiote-infected Onslaught and Peter Griffin, MUGEN is for you.
Check out some of the videos below to see just how insanely ridiculous it can get.
