The release of the 6 Mega Man ($1.99) games on mobile this morning made us ask one pertinent question, to quote the late, great Vince Lombardi: “What the hell’s going on out here?" Ars Technica talked about the badness of the ports, and a commenter stepped forward to claim that they worked on Mega Man 2 for iOS – the initial, maligned release that is no longer available on the App Store – and the issues they had at Capcom Mobile, aka Beeline.

I actually wrote Mega Man 2 for iOS in 2009.

Its not actually a port, and its not an emulator. I took the Brew/C version, and ported that code base to ObjC/C/OpenGL

The code base we had is not the original, the team had previously rebuilt the game from scratch, and pulled the assets from the internet (sprites.co.uk) and music from other spots. Capcom Japan told us they didn’t have any original assets anymore when we asked.

I was told to essentially write Mega Man 2 from a very poor version for old feature phones. Added back in missing bosses, missing areas, assets, enemies, etc. Try to re-create the AI as closely as possible.

The assets part is interesting, because that potentially checks out as to the authenticity of this long-time Ars Technica commenter’s credentials. Shaun Musgrave pointed out to us that Digital Eclipse, who handled the well-received Mega Man Legacy Collection ports, actually re-extracted the assets for those versions of the game. So it’s possible that Capcom had those on hand for whoever helped make these trainwrecks, and caused them to look better than they otherwise would have. Maybe we just need to wait till 2024 or so and see if we can get some better ports then?