M.U.G.E.N. and its legality(or lack thereof)

I was searching Youtube and out of spite decided to search for “Barney must die”. One of the hits was a video of a fighting game with a fight set up between everybody’s favorite purple dinosaur and a seriously massive dinosaur like creature. Needless to say Barney lost. I thought it was a joke but found out it was real. It was a fighting game called M.U.G.E.N. I think it later got into trouble and was considered illegal, which sucks because it could’ve easily turned into one of the best fighting games of all time. I could see myself importing images of characters from all my favorite cartoons and setting up battles.

Is there anybody here that knows anything about M.U.G.E.N.? What happened to it? If it’s still available out there for download?

It’s not a game, it’s an engine / development environment. Loads of games have been and are still made with it, mostly of Japanese origin I think. Wikipedia has a decent description.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.G.E.N

I had played some games created with it, very few were worthy, only one I really want to play again (it was an all new original game with its own mechanics and brand new characters as opposed to a clone of a commercial title) but I can’t remember its name…