This IGN retrospective traces the 32-year history of Marvel fighting games, beginning with Capcom's 1994 arcade hit X-Men: Children of the Atom, which repurposed Street Fighter 2 Turbo's engine into a faster, more spectacle-driven format built around Marvel's mutant roster. The piece frames this genre as one of the rare consistent successes in Marvel's often patchy video game history, distinct from the studio's stronger open-world or weaker licensed shooter efforts, and sets up a wider look at the series' evolution through to the upcoming Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.

The article details how Children of the Atom introduced faster movement, super jumps and air combos that helped it stand apart from Street Fighter, leading to ports across PlayStation, Sega Saturn and MS-DOS and a sequel, Marvel Super Heroes. It also covers Data East's lesser-known 1995 rival Avengers in Galactic Storm, which, despite commercial failure, pioneered the "Assistant Character" mechanic that would later underpin an entire sub-genre of tag-team fighting games.