The Blue Ink Editorials: Being Mighty in a World Waking Up

Greetings, readers of The Blue Ink!

Ordinarily, this series is a
means for me to review and espouse at length about the thematics and
novelties within the Archie Mega Man comic book, but I thought I might
take a moment to reflect on something we’ve all been thinking about
since Labor Day: Mighty No. 9. Does it fall within the purview of a blog
based on a comic book? Perhaps not. So that’s why this is the First of
an offshoot: The Blue Ink Editorials. This makes for one heck of a bully
pulpit, after all… and so I intend to use it sparingly.

Some
background: A friend of mine who I have the unique fortune of being able
to work with on writing projects from time to time has the real world
career of working in the gaming industry in some capacity. While he can
never tell me precisely what he’s doing at any given time because of the
confidentiality his work entails, I do spot his name in strategy guides
on occasion. So when he tells me his views on what’s right in the
gaming industry and what’s wrong, I tend to listen. His laundry list of
worries could almost be talking points for what so many others have
said: Companies focused on mindless sequels and pathetic DLC updates,
the refusal to back projects that aren’t the next Halo/Grand Theft
Auto/Call of Duty, and a disturbing lack of creative foresight. In other
words, the video gaming industry was stagnating, reaching a point where
the kludge, the sheer mass of poorly designed, poorly programmed,
bug-ridden games and genre knockoffs would pollute the market to the
point of toxicity… and death.

The funny thing is, it’s happened
before. Who here’s old enough to remember the Colecovision, or the
Magnavox Odyssey, or the Atari 2600 and 5200? If you’re not, then don’t
worry, neither am I. When the Nintendo Entertainment System hit the
scene, I was barely talking and I didn’t get one until 1990. That doesn’t mean I never dinked
with one before that.

The point here is that back then, there were so
many lousy, high-priced games coming out that the games industry crashed
in the early ’80s. People believed that video games were a fad that had
served its time, like pet rocks and lava lamps. Well, lava lamps didn’t
die out, and neither did video games. What revived the industry was a
company called Nintendo, and a chubby plumber destined to rescue a
princess. What followed was the grand revival: A focus on the importance
of storytelling, of music, of engrossing worlds we could slip into. In
short, the video gaming industry we have today all spawned from one
grand act of creativity, and a childlike perspective on heroism with
fair dose of comedic awesomeness.

In our own circle, we pay
homage to Mega Man, the Blue Bomber. He’s called the Blue Bomber because
he’s blue, or at least that’s the slogan I had on a t-shirt in my
closet for the longest time until it fell apart from wear (And for that, you should feel ashamed. –Ed.).

And Mega Man,
too, spawned from a simple idea: A little robot who saved the world
from a mad scientist. Keiji Inafune, and the rest of the Mega Man
devteam at Capcom, believed in the idea of this blue robot so much that
they used their own free time and pushed themselves to exhaustion to
make Mega Man 2, the sequel which launched Capcom into the video games
market with a vengeance. And for a good long while, it was something we
all loved. Beyond the original series, we had Mega Man X, Mega Man
Legends, an alternate reality to the original series called Mega Man Battle
Network and Star Force, and of course, Mega Man Zero and ZX. All of these were
wonderful in their own ways.

Long ago, at the start of the comic
series, I spoke of the Mega Man fan community, and how very strong and
devoted it is. Through games we wish hadn’t been made (X7) and games we
wish they had (Legends 3), we stayed strong in our loyalty to Mega Man.
And it hasn’t always been easy. There were parts of X5 which drive a man
insane, and X6 was pretty much a washout.

In my own case, it became a
love-hate relationship: I loved Mega Man, but hated Capcom for the way
they had treated him since Mega Man 10 left the assembly line. We craved
more, only to have the rug yanked out from us every time. Multiple
games were canceled. He became a living joke, with poorly chosen cameos
over quality franchise entries. In the search for profitability, in the search for the
“casual, standard gamer” stereotype who they believed would give them
the most sales, the company who had given us Mega Man seemingly had
thrown him out into the cold and left him to die. Perhaps that was why Brawl in the Family’s fan animation
about his reappearance in the next Super Smash Bros. was so poignant:
His struggle for survival became every Mega Man fan’s struggle as well.

And
what of Keiji Inafune, the man behind the Blue Bomber? He had left
Capcom on sour terms: They said it was because he’d reached the upper
tier of advancement and he wanted more, he said it was because they had
become too narrow-minded to change, to adapt to a changing market. In
such cases of he said/she said, I preferred to take a step back and let
the actions afterwards speak for themselves. And while Keiji continued
to speak out about the need for adaptation and transformation… Capcom
continued to let my favorite blue robot fester and wither. “No new
projects” was always the official line. We were left with nothing but a
comic book and manga updates left for our amusement, and to be fair,
that was like giving a man dying of thirst tiny sips of salt water; it
was killing us slowly. I love the comic book, I love what the team at
Archie is doing with it, but it’s not enough on its own. It might keep a
fandom on the barest life support, but it won’t grow it, not by enough.

You
might say for the last two years, we had all been asleep. The day Mega
Man Legends 3 was canceled, and shortly after, when Keiji Inafune left
Capcom, it was like being stranded in a coma, with no way to pull
ourselves out of it. We moved on, we tried to get by. We persuaded
ourselves to stay busy with idle tasks, but we never forgot. We never
quit hoping, even when it got hard. At least, in the small corner of the
world where Mega Man fans resided, we were merely asleep.

And on Labor Day weekend this year… the world woke up.

I
probably have a unique perspective on things: As a guy who studied
history in college and wrote Mega Man fanfiction on the side for a
decade plus, I looked for patterns in the chaos. I always tried to keep
things in perspective. I looked for cause and effect… and the ever
elusive shifting of a paradigm. In some ways, it makes me a pretty good
fellow to review the comics, and in others I’m sure my style grates on
people’s nerves. On occasion, I like to link to ideas.

Ideas are
powerful things; they outlast us. Humanity is mortal, but an idea or
symbol, as Bruce Wayne said in Batman Begins, cannot be killed.
In the absence of Keiji Inafune, Capcom had seemingly done everything it
could to kill off Mega Man. They could not kill the idea of it,
though… of a little robot who rises up with a sense of justice in his
heart and protects the world from those who would do it harm.

At
the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, Keiji Inafune and his former Capcom buddy
Ben Judd dropped the bomb that shook all of us awake: The dream of a little robot
was not dead. Mighty No. 9 has swept the video game world by
storm, and single-handedly given us a reason to breathe again. We now know
the game will happen, and we know it’ll happen across multiple
platforms: Right now, it’s just a question of how frigging huge the game
is going to get.

And now we get to the meat of this editorial.

——————————-

On
Kickstarter, where Mighty No. 9‘s being funded, people who
pledge money to projects are called Backers. Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter
people, on the other hand, have taken to calling themselves “Beckers”,
in honor of the game’s hero… and the Becker Brigade? 41,000 strong and
still going. Some pledge because they want to keep the dream alive. Some
pledge because, hey, it’s Keiji Inafune. Others pledge because they’ll
do anything they can to stab a tiny knife into Capcom.

They
really shouldn’t, though. One of the first updates they gave made it
clear that Mighty No. 9 wasn’t about flipping anyone the middle
finger, but instead was about reviving sidescroller action games, and
transforming a concept into the modern age. I’ll readily admit, such a
thought of revenging myself upon that company was one of the first
thoughts in my mind, but I overcame it soon after, choosing instead to
focus on the positives of what the project meant. What did I really want
out of it?

In the end, I realized I wanted a game with great, memorable
music, tight and easy to understand controls, and a game which taught
me to play without ever having to worry about tutorials. I wanted a game
which would have me coming back to it time and again, maybe because I
wanted to dink with weapons, maybe because I wanted to explore, or maybe
because I just wanted to see how awesome and fast I could blaze through
levels. These are all things I know that the Comcept team will deliver
on. I don’t see my love of Mighty No. 9 as a betrayal to the
fandom… rather, I see it as a natural extension, an evolution from it.
You can love multiple things, have fond memories of different shows and
games, after all. But as I said in the epilogue of one of my fanfics
long ago: “Remember the past, live in the present, and look to the
future… but do not fear it.”

But what’s the significance of
this? Why would I bother talking about this Kickstarter project, wasting several hours of my time and the minutes of yours it’ll take you
to read this article from start to finish? Remember what kind of a guy I
am. I look for themes and patterns, and aspects to fixate on. If you’ve
followed my incoherent ramblings at the start, you’ll remember that I
spoke about waking up… the need for change… and the great Video Game
Crash before the rise of Nintendo.

Mighty No. 9 and this
Kickstarter drive may be exactly the kind of change needed. This isn’t a
project where a major games company is spending hundreds of millions
and three years of development to make yet another sequel to some
sh’mup. This is a project being put forward by a guy with a vision, and a
team of his trusted friends and allies willing to make it a reality.
More importantly, they didn’t go to a big games company: They came
directly to the fans.

Perhaps this is the new future of video
games: Small teams with brilliant ideas, coming straight to the fans and
saying, “wanna do this?” There’s a certain level of brilliance to the
approach Keiji Inafune and Comcept took with Mighty No. 9: They called
on the fans, and the fans answered. We made it go viral. We spread the
word. We funded the project. In the span of a few short days, people all
over the world told them, “we believe in this, and we believe in you.”
And we’re still telling them that, because the numbers keep ticking up.

If I were a corporate executive at Microsoft or Nintendo or Sony, I’d
be sitting up in my chair and thinking long and hard about the
implications of what this project means. I firmly believe that what was
started this past Labor Day weekend will resonate beyond October 1st,
when the Kickstarter drive ends. The desire to bring quality games is
there. The desire to sell them is there. Sony’s already gone public with
news that they plan on making it easier for independent publishers to
bring their stuff to the market. I expect the others will follow suit as
well (Actually, they already have. –Ed.).

There will always be a need for Mario, for Link, for the
Master Chief, and (occasionally) for Sonic. There’s also a large hole in
the mosaic where Mega Man used to be. And no, Beck, as Mighty No. 9 is named, isn’t a replacement for the Blue Bomber. The Metal Modder
is more of his descendant. In Beck, and in this game that has not even
yet been made, are the hopes and dreams of so many. Dreams of a new
sidescroller, of a new robotic hero, of a new world where the
stories of human/robotic relations can be explored afresh.

If you’ve
pledged to the drive, like I have, you have the thanks not only of me,
but of every other member of the Becker Brigade as well. If you haven’t,
then I urge you to do so. Even if you only pledge five bucks, even if
you only pledge twenty for the game, pledge. The game is happening, but
every dollar, every Becker, sends a more powerful message to the gaming
world.

We are Mighty. We are many. And we have woken up.

For the Blue Ink.

—–

When he isn’t writing “The Blue Ink” reviews for The Mega Man
Network, Erico (The Super Bard) spends his days keeping track of the
“Legacy of Metal” fanon, dabbling in cooking and tea-brewing, and
exploring the human condition from his Iowa stomping grounds.

The views expressed here reflect the views of the authors
alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mega Man Network.