PAX Prime in Seattle, WA is currently underway and already there are reports of possible legal disputes between devs and corporations. As you may have read, Keiji Inafune, the co-designer for Mega Man announced last night that he has started a Kickstarter for a new Mega Man-like game called Mighty No. 9.
In an interview with Kotaku at PAX, Inafune had this to say,
“We haven’t heard anything from Capcom at this point. If it turns into a legal battle, then obviously it’ll be lawyers that hash out what the solutions are. However, from my perspective, Mega Man is something that I created. It would be like having a child, then having somebody adopt that child and then saying that child isn’t really yours. That child has your DNA in it, no matter what anybody says. So, since my style, my spirit isn’t something that I can’t change as a human being, if I create anything and it’s something that looks like [Mega Man], well, it was created by the same person, me. To say that Mighty No. 9 looks like Mega Man is to say that my work looks like my work.
But we have been careful. The base gameplay is not the same as Mega Man. The naming, the character, all that is not the same. The details are very different. Personally, I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that this is something original. And if Capcom does come back and say something, I would be surprised.”
Obviously with Capcom holding the rights to the Mega Man franchise, the similarities of the two games are striking and the legal team may take some sort of action against it. This would be bad for backers since the Kickstarter has already raised over $500,000, more than half of its initial goal of $900,000 in less than 24 hours after launch.
It will be interesting to see if Capcom does anything. I would hope that since Inafune is one of the original designers, Capcom would go easy on him out of respect. Hopefully, we will have a great Mega Man alternative for all of us PC players in the future.
