Of all the developers currently tapping into the retro market, Capcom really seems to get it. The development team working on Mega Man 9 really demonstrates their understanding of their target market: the retro gamer. The graphics and music fit right at home with its NES brethren, as does the promotional artwork shown at E3. Even more telling is that they have programmed in to Mega Man 9 the option to recreate NES hardware limitations: game slowdown and sprite flickering when there’s too much information on the screen!

Gamasutra has talked a little bit with Hironobu Takeshita, producer of Mega Man 9 about the game’s unique (in today’s market) style:

I think this is the first example of a developer making a truly retro game for a new download service. I was wondering if you could talk about where you guys got the idea from originally to do that.

Hironobu Takeshita: First, I’d like to thank you for asking me this question – why we decided to bring this back and go with the retro style. As you know, [Capcom head of R&D Keiji] Inafune… Mega Man was one of his first games, and he’s always wanted to bring it back. There just hasn’t been a chance to do so yet.

Mega Man is a simple game, but it’s one that you can get into quickly and really enjoy playing it. We wanted to bring that to a new generation of gamers. Fortunately, now we have download services where we could bring it back. So we thought, “This is the opportunity to do this. Now that we have a method for delivering the game, we should try and see if we can do it – go all the way back to the retro style.”

Especially now, retro games are being evaluated as good games. Not all of them are good, but some of them are being evaluated as good games. Since the generation now may not be as familiar with those games, we thought it’s time to introduce them to that style of gaming. Mega Man is just the perfect game for doing that.

Takeshita goes on to talk about the challenges of reigning in developers who are used to being able to do whatever graphical and audio tricks they wanted and how they essentially developed an NES game without any available NES developer hardware.

HT: Yeah, the equipment used to make the Famicom games really doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have access to that. We have to use modern equipment to make this game. The point is, you have to limit yourself. That was the hard part.

But it was the sensibilities of the staff that were able to recreate that 8-bit feel, because you can go really far with today’s equipment. So it was the staff that brought it back to the basics.

[...]

Did you go through any of the old games and replay them with the developers for reference? Did you just try to remember, or did you actually go through and reference the old games to see what had been accomplished in them before, and where you could jump off of?

HT: Yeah, we replayed the old games. Specifically, Mega Man 1 and 2, because that is the basis of Mega Man 9. It’s almost as if Mega Man 9 is the new Mega Man 3, because we wanted to surpass what we did in Mega Man 2.

Mega Man 2′s got a lot of fans. Fans of the series like that one the best, so we wanted to try and surpass their expectations for this game. So we played Mega Man 2 a lot to get the inspiration for this game.

Be sure to read the rest of this interview – it’s an interesting glimpse into the differences between retro and modern game development. Are we at the start of a rejection of polygons and a return to pixel sprites? Simplicity over shock-and-awe? Will gameplay become king once more?