“Since a loss in the game held the real life consequence of requiring me to play through the stage again, our goals became one. Mega Man’s potential death carried with it not just a fictional weight, but a real cost to my personal life, and thus a victory carried with it a true emotional reward. It was a temporary marriage of the world of Mega Man and reality.”

– Brice Morrison on what, aside from simple aesthetics, sets Mega Man 9 apart as a retro game.

Getting frustrated used to be a way of videogame life. Now—perhaps rightfully—it’s been relegated to what are basically novelty titles. The early Mega Man games are classics, obviously, but they’re also a few of the only games to capture this frustration-as-progress feeling that Morrison seems so hung up on in a way that is actually fun.

The games from this era that have held up have done so largely because of their universal appeal— The mechanics are so simple that the object of the game is basically “walk to the right and don’t piss yourself off.” Repetition makes most people angry, and ingame death causes repetition. The videogame-indifferent population can have fun with the likes of Mario and Megaman, though, because of the brilliant, essentially intangible ways their design engineers your increased skill through nothing more than dying over and over. Most games didn’t do that.

Basically: Mega Man 9 is great, but don’t go getting all teary-eyed for the days of being seven and playing the Friday the 13th game for hours at a time because you were seven and didn’t have anything else to do. It wasn’t that cool.