What We Talk About When We Talk About Shuma-Gorath

Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter (1997)

It’s been a while since I’ve written too many words about video games. Time to indulge an old bad habit.

I imagine that for anyone under the age of twenty today, it must difficult to imagine a mass media environment where (1) entertainment companies played fast and loose with their intellectual property licenses, and (2) licensing an IP to a video game developer was kind of an afterthought. But this was indeed the state of affairs from the early 1980s until the late 1990s or so, and it brought us the golden age of Ramen Licensed Games.

I accept full responsibility for the attempted coinage of such a stupid term. I’m desperately trying to connect this briefly flowering genre to Spaghetti Westerns, those European-made gunslinger films with international casts and post-dubbed dialogue. But what I’m talking about here is that decade or so—roughly between the middish-eighties and the middish-nineties—when large American entertainment firms routinely licensed their big IPs to Japanese video game companies. Top Gun, Rambo, The Little Mermaid, Jaws, Robocop, Gremlins, The Goonies, Friday the 13th…American brands, Japanese games.

Since these console and arcade titles were released at a time when few people were interested in documenting such things, it’s hard for someone without access to elderly studio managers or game designers to know exactly how the agreements were hammered out and how much trans-Pacific communication occurred over the course of development. I’ve really got to wonder how the pitches to companies like Warner Bros. and Disney were delivered. Why don’t you give this overseas video game developer you’ve probably never heard of permission to make an adaptation of your popular intellectual property? The turnaround will be prompt. The kids will love it. It’ll move units, increase brand awareness, and pay a tidy little dividend. Don’t worry—the Japanese make games as good as they make cars and electronics. You won’t regret this.

And so kids my age played Kemco’s Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle on the NES, Sega’s QuackShot Starring Donald Duck on the Genesis, and Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the arcade—among many other titles. Since Japanese arcade and console game developers were operating on an altogether higher plane than their opposite numbers in the West, the quality of these offerings left little to be desired, even if you happened to notice that their use of the English language could be a mite glitchy.¹

But the standard of quality was different then. For instance, Sunsoft’s Batman (based on the Tim Burton film of 1989), was a darkly atmospheric, tightly designed, and brutally challenging little 8-bit platformer—and that was all it had to be. There were no other boxes for it to tick off. There was no sense in asking: How true is it to the source material? How does the gameplay make the player feel like they’re Batman? How does it bring the storied environments of Gotham City to life? How deep is the story? What Easter eggs, fan-favorite characters, and other treats does it have for hardcore batmaniacs? It was all moot. The A button made Batman jump, the B button made Batman punch, and Batman stood 32 pixels tall and those pixels were in three colors: lighter puplish-blue, darker purplish-blue, and black. To represent Batman’s famous rogue’s gallery, the developers made shit up, and then named the results after B-list Bat-villains post hoc. Story? You want your Batman game on the Nintendo Entertainment System should have a story? Here’s your goddamn story.

Batman (1989)

Batman, like most video games of its time, is possessed of a nebulous, dreamlike quality. It demands that you, the player (an eight- or nine-year-old boy circa 1990), accept the facts as they are: Batman is a determined little purple man who runs around umbriferous cyberpunk-gothic environments where he kick-jumps off the walls and shoots little missiles from a pistol at killer robots. From time to time he tangles with a giant cyborg or mutant; at the climax he fights Jack Nicholson’s Joker at the top of a clock tower that looks like an MS Paint vision of Piranesi on the theme of gearwork. Also, the Joker has the power to raise his arm and call down lightning from the sky for some reason.

But it all makes sense—and it is all authentically, officially Batman. In late Wittgensteinian fashion, the coherence and the meaning of it all comes together through the activity of playing the game—and given the low-definition simplicity of the imagery, the fragmentary, non-sequitur “story,” the implausible environments, and scarcity of verbal content, the player must actively create much of Batman’s meaning; the title sequence, the sporadic appearance of Jack Nicholson’s pixelated mug, and the Batman logo fixed at the top-left corner of the screen keep the affair bracketed in the understanding as a Batman experience. (Not the Batman experience—a Batman experience.)

Judging Sunsoft’s Batman by the standards of its time, I’d award it 4.5 out of 5 stars. If you’re into this variety of unforgiving old-school game, it definitely holds up. But it’s not the best of the Ramen Licensed Games, nor is it the most interesting.

The most interesting Ramen Licensed Game is without a doubt the Simpsons arcade game, released by Konami in 1991.

The Simpsons (1991)

This game was legendary. Decades passed before it was ported to any home systems, so for many years it retained the place-specific mystique, the aura of the arcade—or of the bowling alley, the pizza parlor, the diner vestibule, or anywhere else game cabinets were found.² It received a reputational boost by the unfortunate fact that the other licensed Simpsons games of the 1990s (all developed in the United States) were consistently shoddy.

Perhaps more striking today than how dull the Simpsons arcade game becomes when played at home by oneself on an emulator is its slippery fidelity to the source material. Smithers robs jewelry stores, kidnaps infants, and throws bombs at people while running around in a cape and speaking with a strange accent in a voice that definitely doesn’t belong to Harry Shearer. Lisa defends herself from goons by cracking a jump rope like a whip. Moe’s Tavern is literally underground and features live entertainment and gambling tables. The character bios displayed during attract mode are all…off. Marge has rabbit ears because, somehow or other, outdated show notes about this aborted reveal got sent to Japan.

Marge sprites from The Simpsons (1991)

The Simpsons arcade game came out while the show’s second season was in the middle of airing, when the world of Springfield, USA and its celebrated denizens remained indefinite. Konami evidently only had material from the first half or so of season one to work with, so series mainstays like Chief Wiggum, Apu, Groundskeeper Willie, Lionel Hutz, Captain McCallister, Comic Book Guy, Sideshow Mel, Kent Brockman, and Professor Frink—indeed, most of the characters you’d expect to see in a Simpsons game—are absent. Konami had a lot of room to make shit up, so it made shit up.

But that didn’t matter. Anyone who regularly played video games circa 1990 implicitly understood that an arcade cabinet or Nintendo game with the same title as a movie or TV show was going to be like a low-res hallucination of that movie or TV show.³ The more it was played, the more sense it seemed to make. The weirdness could be charming.

The Simpsons (1991)

Despite having been commercially successful since the 1970s, video games were still regarded as something of an exogenous species within the media landscape of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Except when they were the subject of a moral panic, people over a certain age weren’t certain about how seriously games should be taken. What were good games? What were bad games? Was Super Mario Bros. culturally significant, or just a fad of a children’s toy? Were video games toys? If not, was it appropriate to judge them by standards similar to those used by Serious People to rate the aesthetic or intellectual value of art, literature, and film?

Amidst rapidly evolving technology, the exploration of new design spaces, mushrooming development budgets, and video games’ growing cultural cache, the question as to how seriously they ought to be taken ended up being answered in practice before theory. By and by, it was no longer considered acceptable for a licensed game to be a screwy satellite product playing by its own rules.

To see what I mean: compare and contrast the Data East arcade game Captain America and the Avengers (1991) with the Crystal Dynamics console/PC game Marvel’s Avengers (2020).⁴ I can wait.

All other differences in content and quality aside: scroll to the seventeen-minute marker in the video of the arcade game. Notice how the supervillain Juggernaut has a big red Rudolph-nose bulb in the middle of his mask instead of openings for his eyes and mouth. Notice how he mostly attacks by somersaulting around like a deranged clown. How likely do you think it is that an error like this would escape the scrutiny of modern-day Marvel? Moreover: if Marvel contracted an East Asian studio to make a basic Avengers mobile game today, how much “Engrish” text and voiced content do you suppose would be tolerated?

We could also look to the misleadingly titled Simpsons Arcade developed by the American studio Electronic Arts and released for the iOS in 2009. It isn’t recent, but it is the second-to-last original Simpsons video game to date.

The Simpsons Arcade (2009)

We might say that Simpsons Arcade was designed as an American-made spiritual sequel to the Konami original—although “spiritual” implies that it possesses something of a soul, which it assuredly does not. It colors very much within the lines, striving for sedulous accuracy in its references to the show and depictions of the cast, and containing absolutely nothing invented or unfamiliar. Unlike the Konami outing, it has enough of a story—and is invested enough in having it make some sort of sense in the context of a crystallized (or calcified) Simpsons universe—to warrant criticism for having a stupid story. While the Flash-style graphics follow the show’s style guide to the minutest detail, they’re stiff and cheap-looking compared to the somewhat wonky but lively pixel art of the original arcade game.

By adhering so strictly to the source material, Simpsons Arcade sacrificed the amorphous mythical quality that so charmingly invested the title it tries to imitate. But at that point in the show’s lifetime, and at that point in the development of the video game industry and market, it was no longer possible to make a truly weird and surprising Simpsons game. The universe of Springfield, USA was thoroughly mapped out and precisely defined, and a video game that painted outside the lines in rendering that world would haven been lambasted for being sloppy, for not doing its homework, for not doing justice to the material.

On the subject of pale shadows of former glory—let us turn now to Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite, the last in a long line of renowned Ramen Licensed Games.

Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite (2017)

Released in 2017, the sixth and final iteration of Capcom’s mold-breaking “Marvel Versus” series of fighting games, was obviously developed with corporate synergy in mind. By the mid-2010s, “Marvel” no longer stood for comics; it meant the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which had a plan, a timetable, and a live-action Hollywood aesthetic.

We can go down the entire Marvel side of the game’s roster and account for the inclusion of nearly every character in terms of what was happening and what was going to happen in the popular megafranchise. Captain Marvel made her fighting game debut in anticipation of her first film; Thanos, rebuilt from the ground up, returned to whet fans’ appetite for his long-awaited master stroke in Avengers: Infinity War. The iconic X-Men characters that had populated every previous iteration of the series were all given the axe because Disney didn’t own the film rights and didn’t want to stoke enthusiasm for properties Fox Studios might feature in its own film products.

The less said about the visuals, the better. It is enough to say that the realistic, MCU-reminiscent graphics relegated the more cartoonish characters on the Capcom side of the roster to the depths of the uncanny valley.

Marvel/Disney evidently foisted upon Capcom the requirement that Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite double as an advertisement for the MCU—and players regarded it as one. They were especially incensed when Capcom spokesperson Peter “Combofiend” Rosas responded to complaints about the missing X-characters with a regrettable spiel about “functions.” The game flopped. It killed the series forever. Even on fairly recent YouTube videos showcasing the game’s flashy Hyper Combos, all of the most upvoted comments express residual disappointment.

In a way, Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite’s biggest problem was that unlike, say, Sunsoft’s Batman or Konami’s Simpsons, it was hobbled by precedent and expectation. Its earliest progenitor, the 1994 arcade game X-Men: Children of the Atom, had the luxury of setting its own bar, which it could then clear with gusto.

X-Men: Children of the Atom (1994)

I am tempted to say that Children of the Atom is the greatest Ramen Licensed Game. Given how quickly its follow-ups overshadowed it, it’s easy to forget the impact it made.

This was X-Men à la Street Fighter II: a perfect merger of two of the coolest things in the early-nineties adolescent male universe. It boasted complex play and technical innovations, and it had the X-Men sounding and looking better in motion than ever before.⁵ Incredibly, Children of the Atom was a Ramen Licensed Game in which everything felt more or less correct. The subtle and not-so-subtle adaptational weirdness people had come to expect from these sort of games was nearly absent. Juggernaut’s face looked right. Wolverine wasn’t shooting lasers out of his claws, and Magneto uttered no Engrish lines. The Sentinel didn’t quite match up to its stiff depiction in the comics or cartoon—but I don’t think anyone was complaining about that. If it was briefly strange hearing a voice clip of Cyclops’ VA from the animated series announcing optic blast! whenever he used his eye beams, it was only because we weren’t used to Street Fighter characters repeatedly shouting sonic boom! and tiger! and cannon drill! in natural-sounding English whenever they performed their signature attacks. To all appearances, this was an arcade game adaptation of X-Men made by people who actually knew, understood, and loved X-Men comics.

With the exceptions of Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, and Magneto as the endboss, the rest of the roster was probably negotiable. The game was so impressive that it was hard to be disappointed for long that Gambit or Jean Grey or Mister Sinister or anyone’s other favorite character didn’t make it in.

We could jump ahead to X-Men Vs. Street Fighter—the formal crossover between the merry mutants and the world warriors, the first Marvel Versus game, the arcade cabinet that had thousands of teenage boys gasping is this even allowed?!, and a sign and distant warning of things to come—but I think I’d rather dwell for a while on Marvel Super Heroes, the immediate follow-up to Children of the Atom.

Marvel Super Heroes (1995)

Allow me for a moment to look at the game’s roster from the perspective of someone in the business of brand management:

Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Wolverine…good, very good. Very representative of what people think of when they think of Marvel Comics. But Psylocke? She’s not the first female character that comes to mind when I hear “Marvel Super Heroes”—maybe Elektra or Black Widow would have been a better choice. But—sure, you’re on a budget and a narrow timetable, you’ve already got her Children of the Atom assets, and it’s still a good twenty years before the Millennials start looking askance at her bizarre trans-racial status, so whatever. Psylocke works.

But we’ve got to talk about the villains. Juggernaut and Magneto—cool, fine, you’ve got their assets from their unplayable boss versions in Children of the Atom. But that means the other two “bad guy” slots need to debut a couple of A-listers like, I don’t know, Red Skull, Green Goblin, the Mandarin, or maybe even Bullseye. And instead you’re doing—okay, who the hell have you got at the bottom right?

I’m certain a majority of players approaching the Marvel Super Heroes cabinet for the first time asked the same question about Blackheart and Shuma-Gorath. We ought to reemphasize how far beyond the pale this would be for a modern licensed game; can you imagine a designer working on the recent Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League daring to make the case that one of the character slots should be given to a “who?” like Ravan or Duchess?⁶

The spikey-headed blue guy at the bottom-right corner of Marvel Super Heroes’ character select screen is Blackheart. Prior to the game’s release in Fall 1995, Blackheart had appeared in exactly seven comic books: five issues of Daredevil in late 1989 and early 1990, and a pair of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher one-shots in 1991 and early 1995. So he was obscure—but Spider-Man and Wolverine had both fought him in the last decade, and he maintained an active presence in the serials. John Romita Jr. developed his visual design, and that did kind of matter. It’d be a stretch, but we could also try to retroactively account for Blackheart’s appearance by saying his inclusion was a nod to fans of the darker track Marvel had recently gone down with its Midnight Sons and Marvel Edge imprints.

What about Shuma-Gorath, then?

It is here that I should point out that the people at Polygon do have access to elderly Marvel heads and Capcom developers. Back in 2021, the site published a fascinating oral history of X-Men: Children of the Atom that also touches on the development of Marvel Super Heroes. The following excerpt features Alex Jiminez of Capcom USA and Dana Moreshead, whose Marvel title was “Director of Creative Services & Special Projects.” Bolds in the quotes are mine:

Alex Jimenez

We [had a lot of back and forth between Capcom USA and Capcom Japan as well], especially on Marvel Super Heroes, more than Children of the Atom. Marvel Super Heroes had a lot of debate on the characters, for who we could and couldn’t use….

Marvel Super Heroes was the one I really disagreed with. I really disagreed with using Blackheart. I thought there were so many other characters we wanted to use. I wanted to have The Thing…And Thor. Those were the main ones I wanted to do. They were like, “No, can’t go with that,” so.

Dana Moreshead

That part. Sort of sitting around in a room with arcane faxing and emailing back — well, barely emailing — sending notes back and forth about who the team could be was always one of the most interesting parts. I still remember when we were talking about the Marvel Super Heroes game, they asked for Shuma-Gorath. It’s always interesting, because everybody is familiar with the Marvel mainstays, but when you’re in a meeting and somebody in there, on their list of the first asks, has Shuma-Gorath, [it’s a surprise].

Even our team, which was made up of some pretty hardcore — let’s be honest — geeks, I think half of them just looked at each other like, Who? Is that ours? Is that yours? On my team, there were three of us that had grown up in and around comics, and we all were just like, The Doctor Strange villain? The squid with one eye? ”OK, sure. By all means, you can have Shuma-Gorath.”

It’s anyone’s guess how Capcom Japan even knew about the character. If Marvel was sending crates of random back-issues across the Pacific to facilitate the Capcom people’s brainstorming and design processes, those issues must have gone pretty damn far back.

Let’s review Shuma-Gorath’s history in the pages of Marvel Comics up until 1995.

He appeared with Doctor Strange in three issues of Marvel Premiere in 1972:

Marvel Premiere #14 (1972)

He and Strange fought once more in the B-stories of two issues of Strange Tales in 1987:

Strange Tales #13 (1987)

And in 1991, he appeared in two issues of the long-running Conan the Barbarian serial (which was then on its last legs and only two years from cancellation):⁷

Conan the Barbarian #259 (1992)

That’s all of the Shuma-Gorath source material Marvel Super Heroes’ developers had to go on. And yet, as Moreshead recounts, he was one of Capcom Japan’s first asks. And instead of screwing their lips and trying to talk Capcom into assigning the slot to Venom, Ultron, Baron Zemo, or some other recognizable stud from their villain stable, the Marvel people apparently just said, “cool, you got the squid monster, we look forward to seeing what you do with him.”

Setting aside a supposed cultural predilection for tentacle monsters, I don’t think it’s hard to understand why the Capcom people wanted Shuma-Gorath in Marvel Super Heroes. It’s probably for the same reason they earmarked Spiral for Children of the Atom and upgraded the Sentinel from a three-story metal golem that shoots lasers from its palms into a more compact humanoid Swiss Army knife. These characters came more or less prefabricated in terms of basic appearance and personality (very convenient), and offered a wealth of possibility in terms of design space. Why wouldn’t they seize an opportunity to adapt a one-eyed Marvel Comics squid for a Street Fighter-style game?

If you watched the video, or have played these games before, you’ve got some idea of how Shuma-Gorath behaves in them. He does nothing like any of it in the comic books. He never shoots out his eyeball or compresses himself into a spikey orb to launch himself at Doctor Strange. He never leaps into the air using a tentacle like a pogo stick. He never poses with his tentacles crossed, giving a dismissive side-eye to a downed opponent. He never turns his “face” into pair of alligator-like jaws or crawls around like a scorpion. For that matter, he should be substantially larger than everyone else in the Marvel Super Heroes cast—he’s supposed to be a primordial Lovecraftian horror who ruled the world in aeons unremembered, for crying out loud.

At least Blackheart’s Marvel Super Heroes adaptation behaves somewhat like he does on the page. With Shuma-Gorath, Capcom was making shit up, taking the same kind of wild, silly liberties with a licensed property that Sunsoft did in Batman and Konami did in The Simpsons. But nobody knew that, because nobody had ever heard of Shuma-Gorath before.

The window closed on this sort of weirdness not very long afterwards. After all, video games were fast growing too technically sophisticated and too high-profile to excuse licensed titles for unmooring themselves from their source material.⁸ Capcom’s take on Shuma-Gorath not only slipped in under the wire, but transmogrified a totally unknown American comic book character into a cult-favorite Japanese video game character by an act of mythical media alchemy.

Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (2011)

Somebody who played (or plays) a lot of Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, or Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and mains Magneto has an intimate relationship with the character—though it feels odd to call him a “character” in this context. Combofiend was actually half right: the Magneto in these games is a union of functionality and aesthetic. He is the gestalt of (1) a stunning ground dash, an eight-way air dash, a beam special, plus everything else he is capable of doing (2) how the player is accustomed to executing these functions while playing the game, and how opponents are accustomed to responding to them (3) the totemic image of Marvel’s Magneto. (What Combofiend got wrong is is that you can’t change the symbol or the sign without altering the significance; we can see the resistance of the disappointed fighting game fan to accepting a different character with an eight-way air dash and a beam special in Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite more generally whenever we watch people reacting to changes in language—grousing, for instance, at being asked to substitute “holiday lights” for “Christmas lights,” “sex worker” for “prostitute,” or “X” for “Twitter.” The referent might be the same, but swapping out a symbol that’s already bound up in a history of use and a network of relational functions for another that comes bound up in a different network changes the overall meaning.)

The [pseudo-]mythical image and idea of Magneto—we probably ought to call it a “meme” in the sense that Richard Dawkins first used the word—ranges far and wide outside of the Marvel Versus games. It’s safe to say there exist thousands of comic book pages’ worth of Magneto content. He can be seen in five different animated X-Men TV shows (counting the unadopted 1989 pilot “Pryde of X-Men”). Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender play him in the movies. You can buy Magneto action figures, resin sculptures, and Lego miniatures. His image is on T-shirts and posters. He appears in several other video games besides Capcom fighters. For a majority of players, Marvel Super Heroes or X-Men Vs. Street Fighter wasn’t their introduction to the character, or the first place they saw or heard the name “Magneto.” In the public consciousness, the eight-way air dash and beam special are merely facets of the Magneto meme, and not even the most prominent ones.

As for Shuma-Gorath, consider the arcade games he was featured in, and when they were released: Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2—1995, 1997, and 2000. In 1995, many (possibly most?) of the people puzzled by his inclusion in Marvel Super Heroes couldn’t even access the internet to run a search for his name. By 2000, that had changed—but while it was possible to go to a fan site, a message board, GameFAQS, etc. and learn that Shuma-Gorath was an obscure foe of Doctor Strange, there wasn’t much to do with the fact but sit on it. He wasn’t in any TV shows or movies. There weren’t any Shuma-Gorath T-shirts, posters, or action figures one could buy. Marvel certainly wasn’t selling digital back-issues yet, and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether full-length scans of Marvel Premiere or Strange Tales were floating around the internet before torrenting took off. If someone really wanted the Shuma-Gorath comic experience, the most reliable way to get it was to call up comic book shops and search eBay.

Moreover: after appearing in Conan the Barbarian #260 in 1992, Shuma-Gorath didn’t show up in the pages of a single comic book until issue #26 of 4 (as in “Fantastic Four”), published in 2006.

So—during the heyday of the Marvel Versus games in the arcades, which elevated Shuma-Gorath’s profile to heights never realized in the comic books, he literally remained a game-exclusive character. The whole idea of Shuma-Gorath was effectively impossible to detach from Capcom’s take on him. The wiggly one-eyed squid with charge moves and a throw that restored green health in Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter but only red health in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 constituted the primary facet of the Shuma-Gorath meme.

Nevertheless, when he started to reappear in the comic books (which would never have happened if Capcom hadn’t reminded Marvel’s writers and editors that the character existed) he was once again depicted as the giant Lovecraftian horror-god he had always “officially” been.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 entered into development around the time Disney acquired Marvel. Everything about the gaming industry had changed by then—and Marvel wasn’t the same company it had been in the 1990s. When Capcom asked to use Shuma-Gorath again, Marvel said “no.” Maybe Shuma-Gorath wasn’t a character it wanted highlighted; maybe the discrepancy between the official comic book version and the video game version was too egregious; who knows? Reportedly, Capcom dug in its heels and insisted, vehemently, that Shuma-Gorath be on the roster.

Marvel relented—and seemingly never tried to have a conversation with Capcom along the lines of: “okay, look, Shuma-Gorath’s been in the comics again lately, and he’s the size of a friggin’ house and doing the whole ftaghn! thing. If you’ve got to have him in the new game, maybe could you please think about adjusting how you depict him?” Or perhaps Marvel did say something of the sort to Capcom, and Capcom blew them off. Who knows? At any rate, Shuma-Gorath returned as a one-eyed squid dude who turns into a spikey rubber ball, whirligigs his tentacles around in midair, and mugs for the camera after powerbombing an opponent.

Shuma-Gorath Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 trailer (2011)

In the public consciousness, I think, there are two distinct Shuma-Goraths now. There’s the Marvel Comics villain that first appeared as a Doctor Strange villain in comic books that nobody remembers, and now sometimes appears as a cosmic horror entity in comics not very many people are reading these days; this was the version that appeared as “Gargantos” in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And there’s the version of Shuma-Gorath that exists as a bizarre Capcom fighting game character—and I do believe that’s the one that most people talk about when they’re talking about Shuma-Gorath.

In 2012, Capcom released Street Fighter X Tekken, another IP crossover fighting game. I’ve never played it. I’ve never seen it being played. All I know about it is that it included Mega Man as a joke character—and not the familiar Mega Man, the spunky little blue robot of justice. Street Fighter X Tekken casts “Bad Box Art Mega Man,” imagining that the figure represented in the notoriously awful illustration for the American release of the original Mega Man game was a distinct version of the character with a “life” of his own. I’m not sure how well the joke went over, but I thought it was funny—and I’d kind of like to believe that Capcom was knowingly riffing on what it had already done with Shuma-Gorath for real.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to a Barcade. After having several drinks and sinking twenty bucks’ worth of tokens into Crazy Taxi, Point Blank, and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, we looked at the food menu. This particular barcade has a rotating hot dog special; that week it was called the “Shuma-Gorath.” I tried to explain to my wife why I thought this was so funny and what the deal with Shuma-Gorath was—but I’m afraid I wasn’t very articulate. If the Shuma-Gorath is ever back on the Barcade menu, now I can point her to this.

1. Okay, to be fair, a lot of these games were crummy at first—Kemco’s 1987 NES game Superman comes to mind—but they very quickly improved. (And Superman is still sort of wonderful for opening with an anime-style Statue of Liberty warning Clark Kent about General Zod.)

2. Correction: I should have said that decades passed before it got home ports that anyone knew about.

3. This was the case for licensed games in general, not just the Japanese ones. Take a gander at the 1994 SNES game Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, made by LucasArts. How long can you watch before feeling insane?

4. Notice too that Data East is a Japanese firm, while Crystal Dynamics is American. Ramen Licensed Games became less and less common as Western game developers caught up to their Japanese counterparts. It’s easier for a licenser to communicate and coordinate with a licensee, after all, when everyone’s on the same continent and fluent in the same language.

5. (1) If only the cartoon could have been as well-animated.

(2) Compare Children of the Atom to the [American-made] X-Men game that came out for the Sega Genesis in 1993. It’s not exactly a fair comparison in light of the hardware gap, but jeez—Capcom still makes Sega of America look like they weren’t even trying.

6. You’d know who they are if you’d read John Ostrander’s original Suicide Squad series.

7. But let’s make this complicated. The Conan the Barbarian character was invented by author Robert E. Howard (who, it just so happened, belonged to HP Lovecraft’s circle of correspondence and participated in the conspiracy of reference and citation that became the Cthulhu Mythos), who also created Shuma-Gorath by way of a passing Lovecraftian allusion to “the iron-bound books of Shuma-Gorath” in a short story called “The Golden Skull.” Those iron-bound books appear with Shuma-Gorath in those two issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian.

We can make a pair of guesses about Shuma’s glaringly incongruous appearance here. One: he’s a shapeshifter and can be a toothy chthonian beastie whenever he doesn’t feel like being a one-eyed squid. Two: this was intended to be Shuma-Gorath à la Robert E. Howard, not Doctor Strange’s Shuma-Gorath. (To make things more complicated, apparently Marvel lost the rights to Shuma-Gorath when it recently lost the rights to Conan.)

8. Another study in contrasts: two versions of Batman & Robin. One developed for the SNES by Konami, the other developed for the Genesis by the short-lived Clockwork Tortoise. The SNES version (1994) tries to faithfully replicate the aesthetic and the action of the celebrated animated series in video game form; the Genesis version (1995) is an utterly implausible run & gun game where Batman and Robin toss out baterangs at the same rate the player characters in Contra or Metal Slug spray bullets. Later Batman games would take after the SNES version—which, incidentally, was made in Japan, while the wacky Genesis game was an American production. (I do think, however, that the Genesis version is remembered as the better game.)