Origins of The Mega Man Network

With the relaunch of The Mega Man Network finally upon us, I thought it might be fun to look back and see how this site came to be in the first place. And for that, I knew there was one person I had to reach out to.

It was the start of a new millennium (or on the cusp of one, depending on who you would ask) as Steve Watts, perhaps better known to members of the community as “SporkyReeve” or just “Reeve,” was just a high school kid who was preparing for college when inspiration struck. He liked building websites and he liked writing about games, but up to that point, he’d only been part of a small community of friends that had been developed at the crossroads of his GeoCities web page (kids, ask your parents) and some Final Fantasy message boards (ditto). He was ready for something with greater ambition, yet a tighter focus.

But what was it about the Blue Bomber that made him this focus? “Mega Man always had a special place in my heart,” Reeve explained, “in part because of nostalgia for when I was very young. Growing up in Maine, my best friend and I bonded over video games, and Mega Man was one that always stood out to me — passing the controller back and forth in Mega Man 3, barely finishing those tough Mega Man 2 throwback bosses.”

“I had long since moved (several times) and lost touch with this friend,” he continues, “and I think a part of me missed spending time with him and wanted to reignite that passion I had for old-school video games that I shared with him.”

“I’m sure a lot of people have stories about summer jobs or spending time with friends in their last summer before college,” says Reeve, “but my summer was mostly spent building a website about Mega Man.” And by the August of 2000, a website was born: Mega Man X Online.

Mega Man X Online was about more than simple nostalgia, though; it had a purpose. “At the time, I saw a lot of the video game community not taking the story of Mega Man games very seriously, and also a lot of misunderstanding what happened and when and in what order,” Reeve recalls, noting that this was before series such as Mega Man Zero and Mega Man ZX (to say nothing of the Mega Man Battle Network timeline — Ed.) had made things more complicated. “So my guiding principle was that this would be a site that took the series chronology and story seriously. The story in Mega Man is pretty simple, and borrows liberally from sci-fi source material that I didn’t even know about at the time, but I wanted to create a resource that cleared up misconceptions and really delved deep into the story.”

Early goings — or what remains of them, via the Internet Archive.

In terms of the site’s design, Reeve adds “I also wanted to make something definitive. There was a site at the time for Final Fantasy — I think it may have been called Final Fantasy Online — and it had some of the most incredible and elaborate web design the early 2000s could offer. It was a fan project, I think, but it looked incredibly professional. I wanted to make something on that level of design professionalism.”

“I think we were very successful at that first goal, and pretty unsuccessful at the second — since like I mentioned, I was just a hobbyist and not any kind of web design pro.”

While news would come to be a major part of the site’s identity, that was not the initial focus. Asked what set Mega Man X Online apart from other Mega Man fan sites of the time, Reeve said “Well, our focus was very squarely on story, which I thought was going under-examined by a lot of the fan community. That’s why we made sure to transcribe all of the game scripts and create plot descriptions and analysis for every game. We were also narrowly focused on Mega Man X, which was partly because I thought that was the richest vein for story analysis, and also helped to keep the focus narrow enough to be manageable.”

Manageable as it might have been, keeping up with everything that was going on in a timely manner became difficult for Reeve, especially with the site acting as a part-time job on top of another part-time job, and with college courses on top of that. “I couldn’t always be around for every breaking news item if I was in class or working, so I definitely needed extra help to keep everything running smoothly,” he said. So it wasn’t long before he began bringing others on board, such as Kobun20, who provided additional resources from Japan, and DarkMoogle, who added a bit of levity with his “Fiber for the Irregular Hunter” humor column.

At this point, I’d like to digress for a moment, as it was during this period of expansion that I would end up joining the site. It was actually my wife who had made first contact through Watts, and at some point after I’d started becoming a frequent visitor that I was brought on. Strangely, despite the site going on to be a significant part of my life for half its span now, none of us can really remember with any clarity how it came to pass.

“I don’t recall our meeting specifically, but I do know we had mutual contacts in the IRC channel,” Reeve tells me. “And I remember you struck me as really friendly and passionate, even by the standards of a fan community, so that definitely stood out to me. I think we hit it off pretty quickly.”

Well, I’m certainly not going to argue with a flattering assessment like that! Now, on with the story.

It would not be very long before the Mega Man franchise started to grow beyond the humble three series that existed by the end of the 20th century. As such, the site needed to grow with it.

“I enjoyed all of the Mega Man games, of course, and after a few years focusing only on Mega Man X, I felt like we had tapped that as a story resource,” Reeve said. “And obviously, since a lot of Mega Man X is a continuous chronology, you have to start delving into the other series to start explaining where things came from and where they were going.”

“Explaining that the Zero Virus mutated into the Sigma Virus raises the question of where the Zero Virus came from, which traces back to Dr. Wily in the original series. Then whatever happened to X and Zero after the Maverick Wars neatly leads into the Mega Man Zero series. And while it’s become somewhat more clear in the years since, there were tiny hooks linking all of this to the Mega Man Legends series. So it felt like a natural extension at the time, to keep exploring those same themes with a similar story-focused philosophy.”

Thus, Mega Man X Online would be joined by additional sister sites Mega Man Zero Online, Mega Man Legends Online, Mega Man Battle Network Online, and (for my small part in it) Mega Man Classic Online. Together, like five teenagers with attitude, this quintet of sites would be united under a singular banner as The Mega Man Network.

Meanwhile, Mega Man X Online hadn’t been the only Mega Man site shaking things up. On a now-defunct host known as Retrofaction, there was another site called Mega Man Outpost, run by one Slash Raptor.

“My recollection is that we had a friendly rivalry with Mega Man Outpost,” Watts said when asked about the relationship between the two sites. “Obviously, with a small fan community, there’s a lot of overlap. A lot of our fans were their fans and vice-versa, and we all got along and loved the same game series. We wanted to be the first to hit news when it happened, or to offer a review or analysis of a new game, but I don’t think we had any kind of real strife.”

With the kind of overlap between news, resources, coverage, and of course, fans that the two sites shared, a logical conclusion was reached: to pool their resources and unite the two sites into one.

“I don’t recall the exact conversations, but after a while it just seemed silly to be splitting our attention and fan bases,” Reeve explained. “It just seemed like a natural fit. I think we just had to be careful not to feel like either of us were taking over the other one. We wanted it to feel like a partnership.”

Nothing lasts forever, though, and after a few years, it became time for Reeve to depart the site and move on.

“Well, just like Mega Man X Online started as a project before I began my first year of college, I think I was ready to move on by the time I graduated college. I still loved the site and everyone I had gotten to know throughout my time, but it felt like moving forward with the next phase of my life. I had decided to pursue a degree in graphic design — with an emphasis on print design, not web design — and I thought I might still write about video games on the side once in a while, just for fun. I had already made the decision with my degree not to make a career out of writing about video games, so making a clean break just felt like the next step.”

Fate would have a different course planned, however. After leaving The Mega Man Network?

“I made a career out of writing about video games!”

“While working in marketing for a media company,” he explains, “I took up doing some video game news part-time for 1UP. That was the “design as a career, games writing on the side” path I had always envisioned. But the bottom fell out of print media, and while job-hunting for a new full-time job my wife suggested I lean harder into freelancing for video game sites in the meantime.”

“I ended up writing for several different sites, building up a body of work, and eventually having enough to make a career out of it. I was editor-in-chief of Shacknews for a while, and now I have a full-time position at GameSpot. I have to credit my wife for the suggestion, as well as just being endlessly supportive as she worked her own steady job while I slowly found my own.”

It’s funny where life can lead you. If you’re interested in more from Steve “Reeve” Watts, you can find him at GameSpot here, where he writes news, reviews, features, and even the occasional video! And if you’d like to follow him personally, his Twitter is @SporkyReeve.

Thanks for reading!