Early versions of the engine could have this feature adjusted or disabled via the options screen or the config file.

M.U.G.E.N was initially created for MS-DOS by a group of students from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, including Darren Lo, Jim Simpson, and Krian Upatkoon.

beta contained a two-character roster limit, locked game modes and nag screens.

In December 2007, a hack from an anonymous source allowed both low-res and hi-res stages to be functional in the same build.

[10][11][12] In mid 2007, Elecbyte's site returned, though not without some controversy as to the legitimacy of it, as it only showed a single logo with Google ads on the side.

[14] On September 19, 2009, Elecbyte made an unexpected comeback, updating their website with various features — including a forum and a downloads section, where a new build of M.U.G.E.N was available.

Although this build had various visual glitches and required a fair amount of adjustments to the previously made content in order to be fully compatible with the new engine, Elecbyte has stated that it is their goal to have the new M.U.G.E.N fully compatible with previously designed content.

These releases were planned to include significant engine changes that would remove certain character development constraints that existed due to limitations of the old code.

[15] On July 8, 2014, a fan-made port of Mugen 1.0 for Mac OS X was released by Mugenformac,[16] built using the "Wineskin Winery" wrapper.

Elecbyte's site has been offline since 2015 for unknown reasons, displaying a 403 message, except for pages pertaining to official documentation; Elecbyte's last activity was in 2016, promoting a crowdfunding campaign for Rotten Core, a commercial fighting game that was approved to use the engine (the engine's license typically prohibited commercial usage).

An open-source reimplementation project called I.K.E.M.E.N began development in 2010,[17] adding additional features such as online play.

engine written in Google's Go language,[18] is designed to be compatible with assets from M.U.G.E.N and incorporates rollback netcode.

Often authors will port popular characters from 2D fighting engines such as the Street Fighter series, or from TV, book, and game series such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Pingu, Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokémon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Touhou, and others.

[21] Many websites exist to showcase and disperse the developed content and forms in what is often referred to as the "Mugen Community".

M.U.G.E.N also gained more mainstream press with the creation of the Twitch live stream called Salty's Dream Cast Casino (SaltyBet), where viewers can bet with fake money on CPU matches played using the engine.

[24] With the dual status as a development tool and as a game itself, M.U.G.E.N has often been reviewed in periodicals and magazines,[25] usually exhibiting a large variety of works from various authors.