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Imagine the murmuring crowd, congregated around the arcade machine the first time that it was switched on. It had been four years since the 1996 release of Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, the hyperactive, colourful, gloriously messy fighting game that hoisted the world of comic books and fighting games together. Anticipation for this sequel was accordingly high. As the operator stepped back and the attract mode sequence, with its unshakably catchy refrain "I wanna take you for a ride" began to play, everyone wanted to know the same thing: whom do we get to play as?The answer was unexpected. Of the fifty-six playable characters in the arcade version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, only twenty-eight are unlocked when the machine first blinks to life. The other half of the roster, which includes money-spinning favourites Chun Li, Ken, Iron Man, Rogue and Storm appear only as interest-baiting silhouettes. Unlockable characters had been a staple of fighting games in the arcades for years, but they were usually of the Easter Egg variety: unlocked via winding strings of arcane button inputs (to pick Kouryu, the final boss in SNK's Last Blade 2, for example, you must tap out a twenty-button long sequence). In Capcom's new game, by contrast, there was no open sesame phrase that allowed a player to access the army of blacked out figures. Any attempts to find a buried passcode were in vain.
Capcom opted instead for a different kind of scheme, one based on experience points and collective endeavour. Every time a player pushed a coin into the machine, the game itself earned 1XP. New characters and new costumes were unlocked like new abilities in an RPG: when the machine passed certain XP thresholds. The first character, for example, was unlocked when the machine reached 400XP (£400, if one credit cost one pound). A new costume was unlocked at 800 XP. This sequence continued all the way up to level 73, a tier that required 29,200XP, at which point the final unlockable character was made available to play (one further costume was unlocked at Level 84). To help accelerate the process slightly, after every ten hours, the machine contributed 100XP to the pot. In this way the game turned unlocking characters into a collective project for its players, who were invited to invest in play for the community's benefit. In its ingenious design Capcom had stumbled upon a fascinating co-operative metagame.
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