Year: 2002-2012
Date of Archival: Coming soon…
Run by: ryouko
Originally hosted at: www.rockman-exe.com
Status: Incomplete
Archive Link: Coming soon…
The best and most complete Rockman.EXE/Mega Man Battle Network fansite around, this was my middle school haven, especially the forums. For the longest time, this was really the only place to get full, unedited synopses of the original Japanese episodes of Rockman.EXE, along with complete breakdowns of the changes between it and the eventual version we would get in English, Mega Man NT Warrior. It was a place that catalogued differences between the anime and the games and, to be honest, the site I owe my anime elitist phase to. Look, we all had one.
When I was a kid, I’d often find out about game releases through my brother. I’d watch him play, or grab games and videos from him when I wanted them. One day he came home with a copy of Mega Man Battle Network 2. We would go on trips to England to visit family every summer back in those days, and it was on one of those trips that I played it. It quickly became one of my favorite games, and it still is to this day. The combat is tight, the writing is fun, and it’s incredibly replayable because the level design is on point. I was hungry for as much MMBN as I could stand, and luckily for me, Kids WB started showing Mega Man NT Warrior shortly after that. I liked it, a lot in fact, and I wanted to look for more info, and that’s when I was able to dive deep into the world of Rockman.EXE Online.
Learning about all the changes between the dub and sub actually really annoyed me at first. Luckily I had this site to find clips and read writeups of each episode as they aired. It was crazy to me how many episodes were just straight up cut out of the US airings, yet aired in Canada, and how many episodes were just skipped entirely. It wasn’t that new – Pokemon had been airing for years at this point and those “lost” episodes were getting some discussion – but it definitely turned my angry preteen mind into one seething with righteous fury. How dare they edit my children’s anime like this!
To this day I still struggle with calling MMBN anything but Rockman.EXE, at least when discussing the anime. I still say “Soul Unison” instead of Double Soul, and can remember names like Enzan, Forte, and Hinoken a lot faster than Chaud, Bass, or Mr. Match. This website and the forums are what introduced me to cons, with their Otakon meetup seeming to my 14-year-old self like the absolute coolest thing anyone could ever attend. Again, I will not be archiving the forums – my era of the forums came before the massive user purge in…I want to say 2005 – but there’s so many screencaps, synopses, and fun facts about this show and the games that you can’t find in great detail anywhere else. It’s crazy that this site even kept going until Star Force and Rockman.EXE Stream, but go it did.
A few fun memories I have of this site include taking one of the pictures of Shun and Shuryou and tracing it so I could get it printed onto a shirt for school. I was not a very good artist. I also had to learn how to install the divX codec on Windows Movie Maker just to watch the cool downloaded clips of the show from the site. I learned how to use mIRC and download from the #wolfpackproductions IRC channel, and left the computer running for 24 hours just to grab episode 20 of the original Rockman.EXE, which was the only episode I ever was able to download. Whenever I hear about people watching anime in three parts on YouTube I can’t help but age, because before that there was this, and even before that there was tape-trading. I remember when I moved back to the US after my high school years in Italy, one of the first things I did when bored one summer was go to the Wolf Pack Productions website and download all of Rockman.EXE and Rockman.EXE Axess. It took about four hours. That was when I knew technology had really changed. Amazing.
Right now, I’m working on ensuring all the links on this site work internally. I also want to go through and find any dead links, missing pages, or broken images and attempt to fix them up and bring them back if I can. It’ll be a bit of a process before I’m ready to dub this one archivable, and I may wait a little even after all of that just to make certain, but I hope I can one day. It was a beautiful experience, being on this as NT Warrior episodes were dubbed and MMBN games were released, and it’s an experience I want to keep having. Ryouko, Tabby, everyone…I hope you’re out there still meeting at cons. Maybe one day I’ll go to Otakon just like I wanted to all those years ago, and maybe I’ll get to host my MMBN panel, and maybe I’ll see some of you there.