Mega Man Battle Network: The Future Is Now
Over twenty years ago, roaring into the new millennium on the back of the Y2K Panic, society settled into an appreciation for futuristic aesthetics and we all seemed to generally feel like we had entered into “the future,” as we knew it at the time. Between the sudden widespread reach of the Internet, massive, blockbuster pop-culture franchises taking the world by storm, like The Matrix, and the timely release of groundbreaking new video game consoles, like the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and Dreamcast, each of which featured breathtaking graphics for their era, it felt like, for a short time, we had peaked as a civilization, and that the future was truly upon us.
In 2001, Capcom, the famed developers of Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Marvel Vs Capcom, and a million other fantastic games and franchises put out a bold re-imagining of their company’s icon, Mega Man. Gone were the days of side-scrolling action, defeating Robot Masters and difficult platforming. Mega Man: Battle Network, and its accompanying anime and manga titled Mega Man: NT Warrior, envisioned an entirely different future from the one we saw in previous Mega Man games. Computers and the Internet reigned supreme in Battle Network, as it showed an age where literally everything had an ethernet port and could therefore be jacked-in to the Internet. Ovens? Why not? Refrigerators? You would be stupid not to pop Wi-Fi capability into your fridge. And as confusing, yet somehow exciting as all of that innovation was, it opened the door for hackers to get in to everything. I remember an episode of the anime centered around a hacker jacking in to the traffic grid and causing all sorts of mayhem and accidents, which is actually a pretty compelling concept to explore with the vision of the future that this version of Mega Man had in mind.
Now you’re probably wondering, “What does any of this have to do with Mega Man?” That is where the PET devices come in. Think of a Digivice from Digimon, but much cooler. PETs are the device that allow everyone in this universe to connect to the Internet. Each PET device has what is called a NetNavi, a borderline sentient computer program that assists the PET owner. Mega Man, or in this world, MegaMan.EXE, is the NetNavi for Lan Hikari, the protagonist. So the way we see this unfold in the series is Lan, and his friends, along with their respective NetNavi, will go around town trying to help with various issues that have arisen as a result of this entirely Internet-connected world. You might see an oven go berserk, overheating and shooting fire everywhere, for whatever inexplicable reason, the oven has Internet capability, so Lan and his friends will jack-in to the oven, sending their NetNavi over into the oven, and they try to fight whatever virus or issue the oven has, and can often fix it and save the day. Not everything is that simplistic or mundane, a legitimate plot does come together as the story goes on. But, this is more or less, the basic explanation of the universe of Mega Man Battle Network/NT Warrior.
You might see where this is going. If not, I’ll elaborate. We have PET devices. We have really had them readily available for over a decade now. We just don’t call them PET devices. We call them cell phones. But, they really do everything that PET devices are capable of in Battle Network, short of plugging into everything via ethernet. But, Wi-Fi wasn’t as common of a thing in the early 2000s, so for all intents and purposes, cell phones are exactly the same as PET devices; especially because within the last five or six years, we have lots of “smart” appliances that connect to Wi-Fi for almost no reason, beyond controlling the appliance from your phone.
What I’m calling for is an unprecedented joining of the minds between every major appliance and infrastructure corporation on Earth to create an Internet-like setting that can be seen visually, as well as beckoning Capcom to create a real NetNavi system that works through an app, and we can link up with each other and battle and trade, and then jack-in to my toaster and see if we can find the reason why every time I try to make toast, my house fills with black smoke and chokes me out, and I can let MegaMan.EXE punch and kick the charred pieces of an English muffin out of my toaster. Or we can all link up and jack-in to Caesar’s Palace, the casino in Las Vegas, and stage an Ocean’s Eleven style heist. The possibilities are endless.
Obviously, I’m joking about all of the major corporations and infrastructure companies of the world joining forces just so that we can live out our Mega Man fantasies in real life. What I’m not joking about though is Capcom creating an app version of the PET device where we could create our own NetNavi and meet up over Wi-Fi to play with, battle against or trade with other players. I know that the recently released remasters of the Battle Network series actually do have online battles, and while that’s better than nothing, it’s not a replacement for an actual PET or NetNavi that is always on our person. The gameplay could work more or less like the tactics-driven combat of the proper Battle Network titles. Maybe there could be multi-player style raids where a large number of users could gather and battle bosses together, get loot, in the form of “chip upgrades” for your NetNavi, just like in the other games, and those chip upgrades could act as weapons and armor to make your NetNavi more powerful. My mind even conjures up concepts similar to the Skannerz devices from the early 2000s. This was a pretty intriguing idea where you got a “Skanner,” I believe I had the “Commander,” the black and green device shown below, and you would use the barcode scanner to scan any sort of product or grocery item that you could find, and the barcode would generate a monster that you could fight or catch. If they were able to do this in the early 2000s, I can only imagine what would be capable with a modern smartphone. This could add a level of verisimilitude, where you could feel like monsters and other NetNavi were around every corner and available to fight.
I also think that there is a pretty obvious void for some sort of new, more involved digital pet, similar to Tamagotchi or Digimon, and NetNavi could easily fill that hole. I have seen some compelling, if somewhat underwhelming, modern iterations of digital pets, perhaps the most interesting being a Digivice/fitness watch combination device. You can buy small microchips that pop into the watch and give you options for various Digimon that will live in your watch and when you workout, they benefit from your benefit, becoming more powerful and evolving into different Digimon. The idea is cool and is filling some portion of this void, but the package and presentation is quite bare-bones. If any sort of NetNavi type device or app came out and worked anything like what I’ve described, it would be much more popular than these Digimon fitness bands.
I imagine a future where I could have my NetNavi on my phone and sit down at my computer where he travels over to my computer screen and could sit in the bottom of the screen and be like some sort of AI helper, like a much cooler Clippy from the olden days of Microsoft Office. I imagine the only real concern with this nowadays would be if your NetNavi was subject to some sort of hacking or owned by a shadowy company or corporation where it’s collecting and selling your information and pretending to be your friend. If I found out my Tamagotchi was selling voice recordings and data to some overseas data collection firm, I’d hurl my digital pet into the ocean. Although, we know that our cell phones are doing this to us every second of every day and we keep them around.
So Capcom, if you ever decide to make this a reality, which you absolutely should, please just make it awesome and exactly like I described it or even better than I could conceive, and not some sort of data leech.
