Since it acquired co-ownership of fighting game tournament EVO, Sony has been heads down on brawlers like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8. The manufacturer co-markets practically every title that releases in the space, and it’s become the de facto format for titles in the genre.
But, aside from perhaps the PS3 and PS Vita’s PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, it’s never really had its own. That detail, according PS XDev’s Reed Baird, was one of the motivations behind it signing Arc System Works to make Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.
“The inspiration for working on this project really came from a place of pure fandom and wanting to say, ‘Why aren’t we in this space?’” he explained.
PlayStation took the idea of a tag-team fighting game to Marvel Games, who were excited by the collaboration following the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man. But the platform holder needed a developer, and so it approached Dragon Ball FighterZ developer Arc System Works with the idea. Once it told Marvel Games who it had in mind to make the game, the company was immediately on board.
It’s really quite fascinating to learn of the inner-workings of this project. Obviously, Sony and Marvel have an extraordinarily strong relationship now, but bringing Arc System Works into the equation really makes this a power-house collaboration.
It’s also super-cool to finally learn that PlayStation had been percolating the idea of its own fighter for a while. Amusingly, we always thought Arc System Works would be a great fit for some form of PlayStation hero fighter, but clearly this superhero mash-up has much greater commercial appeal.