Back in the early days of Capcom’s collaborations with Marvel on fighting games, a lot of different characters showed up to cross over with one another.
One of the lead directors of most of the titles back at the time, Atsushi Tomita, has recently been on X explaining why some decisions were made, including how the boss design for Apocalypse freed up space to include Cammy on the roster of X-Men vs. Street Fighter. However, he also had some other interesting tidbits to share about Cammy’s inclusion.
When it came to making the crossover of X-Men vs. Street Fighter, one issue that Capcom ran into early on was how to make it believable that the Street Fighter cast could stand toe-to-toe with the superpowered beings in Marvel’s intellectual properties, especially the mutants in the X-Men.
They made a variety of changes to characters to power them up for the games, but with Cammy they actually were unsure of how to approach it, explains Tomita.
Considering they were using the Street Fighter Alpha version of Cammy, who was still under the control of M. Bison as one of his Shadaloo dolls, they decided to employ M. Bison’s Psycho Power to enhance her moves.
He also noted how they decided to give her the airborne Cannon Spike as a new move and as they were tweaking the numbers on it, they ended up with its trajectory breaking their intended limit and having quite the strange movement, but he conceded that “it felt really good to use, so we just left it like that anyway.”
As for thinking up a new Super move for Cammy, the development team struggled coming up with any ideas.
Since they weren’t able to come up with anything unique to Cammy, they decided that since Spider-Man from their previous fighting game Marvel Super Heroes wasn’t making a return in X-Men vs. Street Fighter (likely due to not being an X-Men character), they’d just lift his Maximum Spider and end the final hit to being a grab and put it on Cammy.
Because of Spider-Man not being in the game, they seemed to feel like they could basically get away with just doing essentially the same super move for Cammy.
Tomita also mentioned that back during Marvel Super Heroes there had been rare instances where Spider-Man would drop the Maximum Spider super in the middle of performing it, with the opponent falling out of it.
One of the most clear memories Tomita had from this time was that during their implementation of Cammy in X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the main programmer came to him and said “I managed to fix it so they never drop out anymore!” so, in a sense, Cammy even improved upon the Maximum Spider in the end.
