XXXIX.

Posted by Jeff Craven on July 7th, 2008 filed in Video Games

If you’ve having trouble reaching my page lately, I’m about to explain why.

On the right side of the screen, you’ll see a link to The Mega Man Network.

Right now, though, it’s broken.

This is a website I’ve affiliated myself with for many years, back in the days when it used to be three separate entities: mega.man.x.online, Mega Man Outpost, and Planet Mega Man, respectively (a nice little history, found on Mega Man Network’s old server, can be found here). Through a series of website mergers, these sites have come together to form this one major website, which is considered the ultimate authority on all things involving Capcom’s Blue Bomber.

And then, something happened. Something that hasn’t happened in over ten years happened, and the website practically exploded with excess traffic.

Mega Man 9 was announced.

“Mega Man 9,” you ask yourself. “Wasn’t that a game made for the Super Nintendo?”

No, no. A common mistake, and one made because of how much of a joke Mega Man 9 is. In fact, Mega Man 9 was the ultimate joke in the Mega Man community for over a decade. Mega Man 8 came out in 1997 for the PlayStation (uno) and Sega Saturn. And, as the years passed, the likelihood of a sequel to the game became almost nonexistent.

Capcom had other spin-offs of the original franchise up and primed for milking: Mega Man X, Mega Man Legends, and, later, Mega Man Battle Network. After that came two more: Mega Man Zero, a spin-off of Mega Man X, and Mega Man Star Force, a spin-off of Battle Network. Mega Man was so subdivided, even its spin-offs had spin-offs. The idea of another entry into the original series was such a farfetched idea that it had its own category on popular Mega Man forums: unwanted spam.

Even if it was decided that Mega Man 9 would be made, it wouldn’t fit in today’s market. To understand why is to understand a little bit about the mindset of developers as well as publishers in the late 1990s leading up to right before this current gaming generation, with the 360, Wii and PS3. Sony had created the PlayStation, a video game console capable of displaying 3D graphics, and wanted to market the console as such. This means that games like Mega Man, sidescrolling games on a two-dimensional plane, were unsightly spots on an otherwise cutting edge system. The idea of another 2D Mega Man on a console seemed all but impossible.

This is Mega Man Network’s web traffic for this year. Notice anything special? Why does the end of June have such a ridiculous spike in traffic?

This is why. IGN linked to it. Kotaku linked to it. Every single big gaming website linked to The Mega Man Network when they broke the news. And in doing so, they broke TMMN, along with the bandwidth for jvmwriter.org.

This gaming generation changed the minds of all the developers and publishers. The PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii all have one thing in common: downloadable content. The Wii has the Virtual Console and Wiiware, the 360 has Xbox Live Arcade, and the PS3 has the PlayStation Network. What these enable publishers to do is to release arcade games and pre-existing games over the internet via digital distribution. Just enter in your credit card number and you can enjoy the sounds of 8-bit goodness on your Wii in the form of Super Mario Bros for a nominal fee. It’s a goldmine for everyone because the packaging and distributing process is completely bypassed.

This also allows developers to break into the business by creating small arcade games to release on these services for a fraction of the price of what they would normally pay for creating a game and putting it out on store shelves.

So, Capcom decided to take a chance. They got together with Keiji Inafune and decided they were going to make a brand new Mega Man game and release it on Nintendo’s Wiiware system. Not only was it going to be new, it was going to be in the style of the old NES games to try to appeal to older gamers who used to play the games. I know quite a few people who said they would buy a new Mega Man game if it were like the old NES games. They’re eating their words now.

So, that’s why traffic’s slow on the server. Hope you enjoyed the history lesson.