Mega Man Reboot Codename C.O.R.E. May be Coming to Harmony

A reboot of the classic “Mega Man Battle Network” game may be set to deploy on the Harmony Protocol, the network’s James “Flu” Griffin announced Thursday.

“They’re essentially reskinning and redesigning, changing, a lot of the game logic and everything,” Griffin, a Harmony relations developer, said in an interview with Blockworks’ Ryan Day. “It’s like a trading-card game sort of thing for the abilities but it’s like a live-action sort of derivative of it. And they are interested — we haven’t signed anything yet.”

The popular Mega Man franchise launched in 1987, and spinoffs of the game have sold nearly 40 million copies to date. Developers of the blockchain version, called Codename C.O.R.E., hadn’t announced which chain they would deploy on. A demo for the game posted on Twitter shows two characters in combat in traditional Mega Man fashion.

This is a demo we created a long time ago, showing how far back this vision goes:

In discord we have constantly posted progress to the game we are building now, already having completely web3 integration and continuing to build out the live game features to no avail.

6/7 pic.twitter.com/ojKi4kJ1jt

— C.O.R.E 0.Z – PHASE 0.Z CLOSED (@CODENAME_CORE) May 23, 2022

“They’re like, yeah, we’ll just start building on Harmony,” Griffin said. “That’s why I said I’d talk about them. Because they’re not counting on anything first. They’re not shopping around their stuff to different networks. They’re like, ‘No, for our technical needs, Harmony works.’ So, like, it’s a no-brainer. That’s one that I would say is super promising, not because of the game play itself or anything, but because they’re doing things the right way. They’re saying, OK, what are my technical I needs. I could use Polygon, I could use Aurora. I could use this, I could use that. Well, Harmony has the greatest community and the best sort of gaming landscape.”

Codename C.O.R.E. already has an NFT collection available on OpenSea, but it isn’t clear when the game might launch. The project became active on Twitter less than three months ago, on March 19.

Stand back… I’m about to absorb…! pic.twitter.com/NClDTjwAE5

— Mega Man (@MegaMan) May 27, 2022

The revelation comes a day after Harmony founder Stephen Tse announced a new roadmap for his network, saying he wanted to “emphasize emphasize a stronger focus on bringing more games” to the ecosystem.

Harmony’s Peter Abilla, who joined Day and Griffin in the interview, said the network would be announcing a partnership with another gaming studio unrelated to Codename C.O.R.E. within “the next couple of weeks.”

“One studio that we’re very excited to be partnering with is actually a smaller one, but the founder … is, like, a 36-year gaming veteran. And he was one of the first developers on some of these big games, like Street Fighter, Madden, etcetera. And so he founded a studio focused on bringing some titles to Web3.

“We are going to be tapping him to be an advisor to the games that are building on Harmony,” Abilla said.

You can watch the interview above.