‘Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite’ Was a Flop. Here’s How Fans Saved It

“What am I fucking looking at?!”

Maximilian Christiansen — better known to fans as YouTube and Twitch star Maximilian Dood — stares at his monitor in bewilderment, a flurry of Twitch chat messages buzzing up the screen. The June 2024 Nintendo Direct showcase, one of the last places he or any Marvel vs. Capcom fans would expect news, has shattered his brain: Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection is real, and it’s bringing back seven of the classic fighting games he has championed on his channel since 2011 — including X-Men Vs. Street Fighter and both Marvel vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. 

There are some exceptions: Marvel vs. Capcom 3 didn’t make the cut, while Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, the much-maligned latest entry in the crossover fighting franchise, also remained in the vault after development ceased in early 2018. Christiansen had Infinite covered, though: A month earlier, he announced he’d gathered a team of modders to create what would eventually be named Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite + Beyond, an ambitious mod project, offered free of charge, which included a complete overhaul of the game’s graphics, new modes, and balance changes across the entire roster of playable fighters.

One of his goals for the project was to show Marvel and Capcom that the franchise still had value. Now that the Fighting Collection was real, one thought crossed his mind: “Oh God, it happened, it’s coming back… so now we really have to make sure this mod hits.”  

Modding Avengers Assemble

In April 2024, Christiansen and a few modders began to discuss the idea of refreshing Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite and improve its standing among the other games in the series. What sorts of tweaks to the way the game looks, feels, or plays would need to be made, and was it even possible? “It happened haphazardly over a Twitter interaction” Christiansen says.  “A group of us said, ‘Well, if we can do that, let’s do this, and if we can do this, let’s do that.’ That conversation led us to the point where we’re suddenly working on a big thing now.”

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Christiansen credits Rin, a modder whose recent work includes adding Dragon Ball Z‘s Goku to Guilty Gear Strive, with getting the ball rolling. “In late April, Rin mentioned that she made a program, an editor for MvC:I, just for fun. She said some people were saying they might like to mod MvC:I, so she’ll just do it.” The program allowed potential modders to bypass the usual asset-swapping methods and make changes to the game itself. As Christiansen puts it, “That was a big deal.”

From there, the team grew to “about 15 to 20 people,” as Christiansen realized it would be a project too large for a single person. “In my head, I was like, ‘Well, I can’t rely on Rin to do everything,” he explains. “I would like this to be something that is much larger than, ‘We’re just going to make a couple characters look a bit different.’ I wanted it to be on a larger scale. That’s when we started making a team, and I started commissioning people that are good at production, and artists, and other stuff I thought MvC:I needed to get fixed for it to feel like a different game.”

To find staff for Beyond, Christiansen went back to a well he’d visited before: The burgeoning Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 mod community. Christiansen had at one time put a “bounty” out for anyone who could solve an issue with UMvC3‘s character select screen that was limiting how many characters could be added to the game. “We needed, effectively, a genius to figure out how to break that.” 

Before long, a modder named gneiss (pronounced “nice”) cracked the code, and since then the UMvC3 scene has seen dozens of new characters and stages, supercharging the game’s popularity. Gneiss, meanwhile, went on to create one of Infinite + Beyond‘s most ambitious features: The Duo mode that allows four players to battle two-on-two at the same time with four controllers. 

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“It was a bit of a full circle moment; the people who helped me here were the people who did that MvC3 stuff before,” Christiansen says. “I’m very lucky that I know so many people in the industry that would jump at the opportunity to do this. Just through a lot of the goodwill that I’ve built, we sort of gathered all of the ‘Avengers’ that I know to come and create a team to make this happen.”

“What if Infinite was cool?”

Despite the overall public opinion of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, it always held a special place in Christiansen’s heart. In his mind, it was a follow-up not to the most recent release, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but instead a game further back in the timeline. 

“I always saw it as a sequel to Marvel vs. Capcom 1; a proper 2v2 game. MvC1 was the last time the series was 2v2, and that game had a very specific feel and style to it — and believe it or not, it’s my favorite Marvel vs. Capcom game because of it. I love MvC1.” The project, then, found its first overarching goal: making Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite feel like Marvel vs. Capcom 1: Part Two. Part of this, according to Christiansen, was maintaining that unique feel and style, as opposed to replicating the most recent MvC experience. 

“If we try to make Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Two, it’s going to lead to nothing but disappointment,” he explains. “Many people are upset we didn’t add a 3v3 mode, we didn’t add certain characters, etc. If we did that though, all you have is ‘technically not Marvel 3,’ and that’s not something that’s appealing.”

Along with this, however, lay a much broader ambition, one that might have seemed impossible in the pre-Fighting Collection world where the project was born: The team wanted to make Marvel vs. Capcom cool again. 

“This is the game that sucks, according to many. This is the game that nobody likes. What if we, as fans, added value to the franchise itself, to the point where even Capcom and Marvel would look at what these people did?” Christiansen says. “That was, I think, the personal goal at the end of this whole thing.”

Some fans worried about the legality of all this, and if something like Beyond was destined to be struck down by a copyright claim. The team, however, wasn’t worried; they knew they were in the clear. 

Braving the legal minefield

Christiansen is no stranger to the powers-that-be at both Marvel and Capcom. He’s worked behind-the-scenes with both sides numerous times in the past for similar situations, with recent events like the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 tournament run over the streaming platform Parsec in 2020 and the Twitch Rivals Marvel vs. Capcom 2 tournament in October 2024. According to him, the two sides are “very receptive” to ideas like this, and that they’ve trusted him to do things with their game in the past.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t certain rules to follow. One major sticking point, as Christiansen tells it, is simple: Don’t charge for the mod. “I’ve seen modders get stuff taken down from Capcom, and it’s usually in situations where people are trying to make money off of the mod,” he says. Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite + Beyond, from the beginning, was presented as a free download. 

Another pitfall involves putting the game or its characters in any negative light. A 2023 Street Fighter 6 tournament, for example, made headlines when a nude mod for the character Chun-Li was erroneously left installed by someone involved in the broadcast, which led to viewers seeing the iconic Street Fighter femme fatale in the buff. 

“We wanted to avoid stuff like that,” Christiansen says. The main goal of the project was to just make an existing product better.”

Figuring out the scope

Game development, as anyone involved in it will tell you, is no simple task. Christiansen, fortunately, knew exactly what he was getting into thanks to some previous experience with another dormant fighting franchise: He worked with Double Helix and Iron Galaxy on trailers and story cinematics for Killer Instinct on Xbox One. 

“I knew what we were getting into,” Christiansen says. “We created a development environment with this mod, similar to how game studios work, specifically because we had people who were involved with game development, who were willing to get things produced fast.” One of the first challenges on the project, according to Christiansen, was setting up a pipeline and making sure everyone involved had something to work on. 

Christiansen found himself repeatedly asking for, as he describes, “extremely remedial things,” so one of the producers on the project, Erebus, sat him down and showed him how to get into the system and make those changes himself. While Christiansen was happy to be able to go hands-on, it eventually turned into a burden he didn’t expect.

The project takes its toll

Christiansen is the first to admit that receiving that lesson from Erebus triggered his most obsessive qualities. “At that point, it was over,” he says. “It was three straight months of me being constantly focused, changing the way characters look, finalizing colors, going into Photoshop, learning what I could in [game development program] Unreal Engine, and then solving problems. It took up so much of my time.”

Eventually, it would hit a point where Christiansen didn’t even realize how much of his time it was taking up, and the work-life balance — or in Christiansen’s case with streaming, the work-work-life balance — began to skew. 

“There would just be some days where I’d get so obsessed with changing stuff and making adjustments that 16 hours have passed; it’s just like, ‘I’ve been in here for how long?'” Christiansen admits. “If you’re like me and you’re in there and doing things creatively, you almost can’t help it, and that’s when it gets exploited by publishers and directors sometimes. I didn’t want to put that on anybody else, but it was something that I was definitely doing to myself.”

When version 1.0 of the Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite + Beyond mod launched in December, Christiansen revealed to the team that he would be stepping away. “It really was taking everything, from physical fitness to personal and mental health,” Christiansen says. “It was a rough year because there was so much to do on top of this project, and this was effectively full-time game development.”

The separation from his family, despite being “home,” also played a huge factor in his decision. “There’s also times where I separated myself from having availability to do things with my family in order to hit certain build deadlines, and at that point, I almost felt like I lost a lot of 2024. When you have a three-year-old that’s turning four, that doesn’t feel very good.”

Round 2?

Would Christiansen, should the opportunity arise, lead a project as robust as Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite + Beyond again? “Definitely not” according to him, but that’s not to say he wouldn’t be willing to help other projects from franchises he holds dear; Killer Instinct, Soul Calibur, and Virtua Fighter are all franchises he mentioned as all-time fighting favorites. 

He’s not limited to fighting games, though; there are two franchises in particular where, by his own admission, he’d sign up to work immediately: Final Fantasy VII and Bloodborne. “If the devs were like, ‘Hey, we need you for something,’  I would be like, ‘How long do I have to tell my family I’m going to be gone for?”

Despite his reluctance to lead a future mod project, Christiansen holds a great deal of respect for the community and the great things it puts out. During our conversation, he specifically calls out Rin’s work with Goku in Guilty Gear Strive, the modder Kongmeng who added Dio Brando from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to Dragon Ball FighterZ, and the Resident Evil 4 HD Project. 

“There are a lot of inspiring mods out there, outside of our project that I want to give props to,” he says. “These mods have always been really inspiring to me, but they’re made by small groups of people, and they take a really long time to execute. It makes you realize how much time and effort it takes.”

As for Marvel vs. Capcom, while he won’t be working on it any time soon, should a new MvC be in development, Christiansen does have a couple suggestions for the playable roster. 

“On the Capcom side is the number-one fighting-game character ever made, Strider Hiryu. On the Marvel side is the coolest 2D sprite ever made in a fighting game, and that’s Gambit. Gambit and Strider together again in a game [for the first time since Marvel vs. Capcom 2] would be an absolute dream.”