Mega Man Missing In Action

Let's step inside the Wayback Machine for a moment and travel back to when Capcom was developing a little compilation title called Mega Man Anniversary Collection to celebrate Mega Man's fifteenth anniversary as a video game hero and major profit center.  The Nintendo GameCube and Sony PlayStation 2 versions (and eventually Microsoft Xbox too) of the game covered the Mega Man games for home consoles, while a Game Boy Advance version was to contain the first five classic Mega Man adventures from the original Game Boy.  The problem is that the GBA version was delayed and then basically fell off the face of the planet.  Capcom never officially canceled it, but all word about the game dried up.

Now the game seems to have popped up again.  1-Up reports that - get this - Capcom has lost the original source code from those old Game Boy titles.  I can understand a little disorganization in a company here and there, but how does one lose up to five games of one of their most profitable licenses?  For a company that is known for pumping out the same content over and over again (Street Fighter II, the Resident Evil ports and remakes, etc.) it just seems so un-Capcom to lose old code like this.

Without the original code Capcom can't add the little tweaks and updates to the games (such as full color and game save abilities), so rather than wait and hope the old code shows up, the developers are rewriting some missing data from scratch.  Apparently, as a result the game has been kicked up the food chain to a Nintendo DS title.  No word on any DS-specific enhancements, if any.  At this rate the game should be ready for release in time for the blue bomber's twentieth anniversary.  At this point Capcom should just toss the two Mega Man Xtreme titles from the Game Boy Color days into the collection as well and market it with the upcoming Mega Man X Collection.  If they can find the original source code, of course.