Nostalgia is a powerful thing in entertainment. It’s easy to get people to buy “remasters” of old games and make them pay for it all over again.  It is rare to see remasters done with any kind of polish, and they are often simply ported to and slapped onto a modern console rather than the love letter they should be treated as. Separate from remasters, however, there are also entirely new games coming out with an old style.

Shovel Knight is, as pointed out by John Vanderhoef in the HTPVG chapter “Shovel Knight: Nostalgia” one of many games in a recent trend of intentionally using the older style graphics in an attempt to bring back some of that feel of the older games. These are interesting because they seem to thrive almost entirely on nostalgia. Not to say the games are poorly made, but they

I think of the Mega Man series. The first 6 games are all on the NES, and as thus they use the 8-bit engine that the NES is known for. In the transitions to Mega Man 7 and 8, which used the engines of the SNES and Saturn/PS1 respectively, something didn’t translate quite righ. The games felt slower, clunkier and less fluid. So, in 2008, Capcom had the idea to make Mega Man 9, and bring back the old 8-bit feel of the games. It was even marketed primarily towards the Nintendo Wii, a system where you could use the controller on its side to emulate an NES Controller. It was the perfect storm for a nostalgia trip.

And it worked. The game did very well, ended up being released on multiple systems (PSN, XBLA and Wii Shop) and single handedly returned interest to the Mega Man series. Sales of the older games on the Virtual Console even improved noticeably in the weeks following 9’s release. This also led to the release of Mega Man 10, which also had the same 8-bit style.

But eventually the nostalgia wasn’t working anymore.

For Mega Man 11, the developers would return to a more modern engine and graphical style. The implications of this decision are what is most interesting to me. Of course, it makes sense for them to return back to the 8-bit style for 9 & 10; what was going on before simply wasn’t working. 11, however, is seen simultaneously as a step forward and backwards. Forward in the sense that it is yet another attempt to push the series into modern times, but backwards in that it seemed to be the opposite of what the fans wanted.

Restorative Nostalgia was what ruled the fate of the Mega Man franchise. The series developers constantly fought between wanting to move forward and do new things and the wishes of the fans. The series ended up hitting a stalemate, and other than the recent releases of collections of the older titles, it is looking rather unlikely for a future for the Mega Man series.