Okay Geek Farm
"Top men" at Capcom are discussing and planning the future of Megaman
Ezra Quintana
When Capcom’s Senior VP, Christian Svensson, says that they have “top men” hard at work, discussing the future of the Megaman property it’s hard not to wander back to that famous closing Indiana Jones scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And as one commenter (abigsmurf) on Siliconera put it, “*mental image of Megaman being wheeled in to a giant warehouse, never to be seen again*” Yeah, I’m hoping that doesn’t happen, but as he also went on to say, “Knowing capcom, it’ll probably be ‘updated’ so it’s a Gears of War clone”, maybe I do want it to happen so that can never be a reality.
In an “Ask Capcom Q&A” video, Christian Svensson said that future of the Megaman series are currently being discussed by “top men”, as well as what the 25th anniversary of the property will consist of:
“We are continuing to noodle what our plans and what our celebration should be,” Svensson shares. “There’s a whole bunch of things that we know we kind of have to get in a row before we actually really divulge or start to celebrate Mega Man[…]
[…] I hesitate to say exactly what, because I don’t want people reading more into it than is there,” Svensson says. “Let’s just say there are top men thinking about and actively discussing where we’re going to take the brand for the next ten years and how we’re going to do it.”
What’s that mean exactly for the Blue Bomber? Well, as abigsmurf said in our outset, they’re going to have to redo the whole series entirely if they want Megaman to be relevant to a new generation, (read as: Gears of War clone).
The 7 - 15 year old crowd is certainly not into games with high difficulty, and Capcom can’t depend on the nostalgia factor anymore and continue to craft and design games fitted to resemble the games of the past; it can only go so far, as we saw with the amazing return to the Classic series in Megaman 9, but then realized how old that can get, as well as how lazy Capcom can get in game design, with Megaman 10’s release, shortly thereafter.
The only way to get Megaman back into the fore is to reimagine him from the ground up. It doesn’t have to be an FPS, but a new way of realizing its side-scrolling gameplay roots. A reintroduction, if you will, to the world of 20XX and the way that world runs and lives, and why a “Megaman” character would be needed. But now that I think about it, that sounds almost like Batman. Yeah, that’s why I’m not a game designer, otherwise we might end up with a grim-dark version of Rock that no one cares about, sorta what happened to Bionic Commando, and look what happened to that.
We can only hope that the “top men” at Capcom know what they’re doing, and by the look of it, they have an idea of how to continually bust out success after success even all these years later.
Oh, and here’s that Indy video we were alluding to earlier to:
