Inti Creates wasn’t originally planning on making any Mega Man Zero sequels
USGamer put up a massive piece that recounts the history of Inti Creates. There are plenty of quotes mixed in from Takuya Aizu, the company’s president.
One of the more interesting topics concerns Mega Man Zero. Aizu first explains how Inti Creates originally wanted to kill off X, but Capcom intervened.
The main concept that we wanted to explore was Zero killing X. We wanted to come up with something really sensational. There was something about Mega Man Zero at first that we felt wasn’t quite right — it wasn’t true to our idea of the character. So we tried to resolve that by coming up with this dramatic concept.
Within the team, there was no resistance at all. In fact, right up until we went to master the game, the plot played out with Zero defeating X. However, Capcom as a company… it didn’t serve well for the company to have a series in which X is the hero and then another title where that same hero gets killed off. And so because of that, at the very, very, very end, like right before we sent the game to be manufactured, we had to change it so that the X that Zero kills was actually a copy. We didn’t have time to change the game play, though, so just the story changed slightly.
Elsewhere in the discussion, Aizu talked about how Mega Man Zero was intended to be a standalone game – at least for Inti Creates. However, strong sales caused Capcom to request a sequel. Inti Creates decided to make two more Mega Man Zero titles and stop after Mega Man Zero 3, but once again, they were approached by Capcom for a fourth entry. Zero was killed off to ensure that Inti Creates “wouldn’t have to make a fifth game.”
When we first created Mega Man Zero, we were not planning to make sequels. After Zero’s release, the sales were strong enough that Capcom wanted us to create the sequel. When we began planning the sequel, we decided to make two games. So as we began developing Mega Man Zero 2, we also had had the story for Mega Man Zero 3 in mind for the series.
After we finished creating Zero 3, we actually didn’t want to create a fourth game. Scenario-wise, the story was complete in our minds, and we felt the ending to Zero 3 was a really clean way of completing the scenario. But then Capcom approached us to create another game in the series. Our initial plan was to create a game which was basically Mega Man Zero 1.5, a story between 1 and 2. That was our way of compromising. But, Capcom wanted us to create a true Zero 4 instead of 1.5, so we started to rethink things. We’re happy with the result — the game we created is very satisfying, in our opinion. But we also decided at that point that we didn’t want to create a Mega Man 5, so what did we do? We killed Zero off, so we wouldn’t have to make a fifth game.
