and employs many former Capcom members who worked on previous Mega Man games. The first six games in the original Mega Man series were created for the NES during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A plethora of spin-off series, related games, and compilations were published by Capcom as a result of the original series' immense popularity. The most recent entries in the main series, Mega Man 8 and Mega Man & Bass, were first released on more advanced home consoles in 1996 and 1998 respectively. Keiji Inafune, a designer, artist, and producer at Capcom, has been involved in most of franchise's development. As early as 2004, Inafune, credited as "Inafking", publicly expressed his desire to make a Mega Man 9 as a "throwback to the super old school", but that its creation would highly depend on the input of fans. According to Inafune, the simple fun of a classic Mega Man game "doesn't fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations". He also believed that pushing for the creation of a Mega Man in the style of the original "would be quickly criticized for things like being simplistic, outdated, or too expensive", thus making it too difficult to develop such games in the current climate. Inafune cited the rise of retrogaming services like Nintendo's Virtual Console for allowing the development team to put together Mega Man 9. Not only does the game carry the gameplay and storyline elements of older games, Mega Man 9 is a return to the series' roots, as the graphics and music resemble how their original games looked and sounded on the NES's 8-bit hardware. Inafune felt that the "time was right" for choosing this style of game to please its fans. Capcom's management was supportive in making Mega Man 9 downloadable, but they wanted the game to be 3D instead of 8-bit as they thought the latter would only appeal to Mega Man fans. The team additionally discussed giving players the option to choose between 8-bit and current generation styles. However, the idea for solely using 8-bit eventually won out. The staff was concerned with surpassing Mega Man 2 rather than Mega Man 8, as the second installment in the series tends to receive the most critical praise. Producer Hironobu Takeshita referred to Mega Man 9