Lagarriet Tounes

2010-03-01

Today Capcom released Mega Man 10, a continuation of its 20 year old franchise in it's 20 year old form. After the success of Mega Man 9 done in old 8-bit Nintendo fashion they continued on with Mega Man 10 in the same old fashion. Now creativity has never been a strong suit of the Mega Man franchise, but something a little odd happened with the enemy bosses in this game.

You see in 1992 Nintendo Power had a contest for kids to send in their drawings of their idea for Mega Man enemies. The idea for Blade Man was sent in here by one Lagarriet Tounes, nothing really out of the ordinary, decent drawing, probably around 12 years old at the time. But here we are, 18 years later with the release of the latest Mega Man and we have a Blade Man. Not too suprising except that he looks exactly the same as the drawing, same color scheme, same sword hands and head, very similar style.

I have a couple theories on this, either Capcom is so hard pressed for creative talent that they had to go rummaging through decades old magazines for ideas. Or that with the revival of an old school game they thought they would pay homage to old school fans and actively went looking through the old Nintendo Powers. Or Lagarriet Tounes now works for Capcom, and couldn't come with any good ideas so he stole his own 12 year old selfs idea.

The thing I find most odd about this is that, Lagarriet Tounes has absolutely no web presense. A quick google search of his name returns only a couple of articles referencing the same Nintendo Power. The man would be around 30 now presumably, and yet he has no Facebook, no Myspace nothing else that would bring his name up on a query. It's a pretty unusual name, so you think somewhere there would be something else beyond this one Nintendo Power.

Where are you Lagarriet? Your 15 minutes of fame are back again!