as "the new Mega Man 3" in this regard. The development team that worked on Mega Man 9 consisted of about 20 people total. Takeshita explained that although Inti Creates used their previous experience to create the gameplay, the technical aspects like the graphics and sound, were more difficult to finetune. As the team had a tendency to make these attributes complex, Inafune would often scold them to simplify their work and "bring it back to the basics". Rather than use NES technology, Mega Man 9 runs on a new, proprietary engine that simulates the behavior of 8-bit video games. The game even includes "Legacy Mode", which emulates the low video processing power of the NES by partially rendering sprites, thus causing them to flicker when too many are on screen simultaneously. The developers also considered distributing the game on NES cartridges, but without technology to bridge the gap between the cartridges and current gaming hardware, the idea was scrapped. Takeshita clarified that Mega Man 9 is much too large to actually fit on an NES cartridge. Inafune designed both Plug Man and Splash Woman, while the artists at Inti Creates created the remaining six Robot Masters. Plug Man was used as an example to guide the younger designers in making characters with simple yet unique features. The idea for Splash Woman, the first female Robot Master of the original series, was requested by the planning team. Hornet Man was originally conceived as another female Robot Master named "Honey Woman" before being changed to a male after Inafune presented his design of Splash Woman. Audio The musical score and sound effects for Mega Man 9 were composed by Ippo Yamada, Ryo Kawakami, Yu Shimoda, and Hiroki Isogai. Yamada, a veteran composer for Capcom at this point, worked "with a sense of nostalgia", while the younger designers had to study and imitate the older games. Sound director Yu Shimoda analyzed the audio of the NES Mega Man games for several months before beginning the project. Yamada insisted that the game contains no actual NES music, but rather the "spirit of NES music", as no such hardware restrictions were present as they had been during the development of the first six games. Most of the tracks were created with the quality of these past games in mind, but only a handful actually reference songs from previous games. Character and levels designs were