Us, You, and Mighty No. 9

Greetings folks. Yesterday’s announcement from Keiji Inafune was something else, no? There appears to be a lot of excitement for this project, especially since just 12 hours after launching, the Kickstarter drive is already nearing half of its minimum required funding. And the vast majority of responses to Mighty No. 9 I’ve seen have been positive. But now we’d like to air some thoughts on all of this, and we hope you’ll take the time to read ahead, as this affects the course of the site.

The Mega Man Network is, as I’m sure you’re aware, a Mega Man fan site. Covering Mega Man is what we do, and it’s what we’ll continue to do. But we’re also aware there could be considerable interest in covering Mighty No. 9, too.  Now this is a fan site; we have absolutely no affiliation with Capcom or any other company, and thus are free to post about whatever we like. But we’re also not just a simple Mega Man blog. All that we do here, not just the news but the media collecting, the community interactions, and the prize giveaways, is for those of you who come and read this site. And we’ve wanted to make The Mega Man Network a fun place for fans, since in recent years Mega Man has, aside from occasional licensed goods, fallen mostly dormant.

So rather than making this decision ourselves, we’re giving the choice to you. We’d like to hear from you if you want us to cover Mighty No. 9 in the same way we cover Mega Man. How that may play out in the future, whether it might be determined this site needs re-branding, or have Mighty No. 9 break off into its own site, or so on, remains to be seen. But ultimately we want to do what serves you best. I know a lot of people have very strong, passionate feelings about Mega Man.

Just speaking on my own behalf, I would like to cover Mighty No. 9. I’m always going to love Mega Man, and Mighty No. 9 isn’t going to change my feelings about past games. But really, it just feels good to be excited for a new game again. We’ve still gotten other cool stuff in the interim, and I earnestly believe a lot of people, such as the fine folks at Capcom Unity, are on our side and have been fighting the good fight for us. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the games. That’s what brought us into the fandom, and that’s what we subsist on. When you take games away, little else can substitute.

Ideally, I don’t want just to see Mighty No. 9 succeed and be a great game. I want it to spark ambition in Capcom of Japan to answer back with a good Mega Man of their own. Rivalries have brought out some of the best games; people around in the Nintendo/Sega era know this well. But my pessimistic side worries that the only thing it will spark is lawsuits.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to give this a read, and we hope you make your voices heard. We imagine a lot of you would welcome the coverage, but we didn’t want to make this choice without you. Without all of you, none of what we do here would matter!

LanceHeart