Last night, Keiji Inafune blew the gaming world’s collective mind when he announced Mighty No. 9, a game that closely resembles the iconic Mega Man franchise that he was associated with for more than a decade. Today, he said that he hasn’t heard anything from former employer Capcom, the company that owns Mega Man
“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 perspectiv, 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.”
The game’s Kickstarter campaign is at $563,488 as of this writing, more than halfway to its $900,000 goal less than a day after launching. Kotaku will have more from our interview with Inafune later this week.
