EXCLUSIVE: Champions #5 Variant Sports An X-Men Arcade Theme

You're not alone if you view the 1990's X-Men as your comic pillar, the team that drew you back to comics or drew you into comics in the first place. During those years, Xavier's team expanded into multiple genres and mediums, including a beloved and addictive arcade game.

That game was aptly titled X-Men: The Arcade Game and Konami's quarter sucking brawler was rarely found without several people at the controls. There are many who fondly remember spending hours alongside Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Dazzler as they battled their way through iconic enemies on their way to stop Magneto.

For those fans, the variant to Champions #5 should hold some wonderful nostalgia, as artist Joe Quinones has rendered an amazing homage to the beloved arcade game with the cast of the current Champions. It features Cyclops, Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Viv Vision, Nova, and Spider-Man looking at an arcade cabinet with them on the screen. Not only is it in the same visual style as the game, but it also features them in the exact same poses as the title screen, a screen you saw a lot back in the day since the game was so difficult to complete in one sitting.

You can view the cover to Champions #5 in the gallery, as well as the image its based on.

ComicBook.com's Jamie Lovett recently spoke to Marvel Comics executive editor Tom Breevort about the Champions, and the plan for them coming out of Civil War II.

"All along, our plan for those characters in the Civil War II - Miles, Nova, and Kamala - from the jump, they effectively were the undecided voters. They were the ones who, at the outset, did not have a strong enough opinion on what was going on and thus, were torn between what Iron Man is saying and what Captain Marvel is saying. It's almost like when parents fight. During the course of the event, they were always going to have to figure out for themselves where they stood and not just blindly follow whoever was in front of them."

Champions is written by Mark Waid with art by Humberto Ramos, and next up is Champions #3, which you can view the official description of below.

What began as an idea and an ideal has now become a movement! But the problem with movements is that not even the Hulk can control them!

Champions #3 hits comic stores on December 7, 2016.