With more than 75 Marvel characters appearing in Capcom fighting games over the years, you'd think the comic maker would completely trust Capcom's judgment when it comes to how their heroes and villains appear in-game.
Not so with one particular character appearing in the soon-to-be released Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the game's producer tells Kotaku.
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 includes the original 36 characters from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and introduces a dozen new playable fighters, among them the master of the arcane, Dr. Strange.
Dr. Strange's inclusion in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came about after people started to wonder why Shuma-Gorath was in the game and not his adversary, Dr. Strange, producer Ryota Niitsuma told me.
When Capcom got the approval to include Dr. Strange in the fighter, that OK came with a surprising amount of hand-holding from the comic maker, he said.
"With Dr. Strange, Marvel had some very special requests," he said. "They wanted him to do this this and this. It was very specific what they wanted him to do."
Nitsuma said that Marvel has never been that specific in the past.
"Dr. Strange had the most specific requests they ever made," he said. "It was just unreal; what moves he had; what sort of hand gestures. Very specific."
He said the comic publisher even sent along illustrations showing exact hand positions for Dr. Strange to use in the game.
"There were some bits and pieces we couldn't do," Niitsuma said. "There were some moves we had to counter-offer [with] something else and satisfy their needs for specific things in different ways."
Marvel even over-ruled some of the things Capcom wanted to change. For instance, Marvel requests that Dr. Strange float when he moves around the screen in the fighting game. But Niitsuma and his team said that too many of Marvel's characters were already floating. Eventually, Marvel got their way.
I asked Niitsuma if the close watch on how Dr. Strange looked and moved in the game might be tied to the rumored movie that's in the works. He declined to comment.
You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at brian@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.