Forget Multiversus, Mugen is the king of ridiculous crossovers

Are you disappointed that WB Games is delisting Multiversus in May, crushed you’ll never get to see Daffy Duck beat seven bells out of Superman? Then I’d like to introduce you to Mugen, a free one-on-one PC brawler engine that’s been doing absurd crossovers for over 20 years longer than Multiversus.

If you’ve spent any time on social media, chances are you’ve seen a clip of it in action. Maybe you’ve watched Sonic the Hedgehog KO Patrick Starfish or seen Homer Simpsons get obliterated by screen-filling memes. That’s Mugen and while it’s more Street Fighter 2 than Multiversus, it’s an amazing tool for creating utterly ridiculous crossover battles.

There are a whole host of Mugen releases, but the original can be downloaded here. It comes with one single character, Karate Man. But hop over to the Mugen archive here, and you can find fighters from virtually every property you can conceive of.

We’re not exaggerating, either. Want to watch Anya from Spy X Family pummel Popeye to a pulp? It’s as simple as downloading them and making a couple of minor edits to a text file. It took us all of five minutes to inject Shaggy and Wonder Woman, two of Multiversus’s current roster, into Mugen. We threw in Duke Nukem for good measure because.. why not?

You can find ‘loaded’ versions of Mugen with the characters already installed, but that’s a little legally suspect. None of these characters are officially approved and a few are just recoloured versions of existing characters, but there are plenty of others where their creators have gone all out.

The one snag, potential copyright issues aside, is that these characters have been created independently, they’re often hilariously unbalanced. Duke Nukem, for example, can just blast Shaggy in the chest with his shotgun, again and again and again. But if you got a kick out of Street Fighter 2’s many hacks, you’ll be right at home. Head to MugenArchive to put your own multiversal punch-ups together.