That makes complete sense to me. Much more than when some one-shot game from 40 years ago that wasn't even popular then becomes a Smash Fighter.
That's not being "retro". Retro things at least USED to be popular.
Something like Ice Climbers or ROB isn't a retro-pick. It's more of an...oddity pick.
Well no, the problem comes from the label of retro and ascribing their inclusion to a specific era. Too much significance is being paid to being successful during a certain era while not enough to the fact these characters
remained prosperous while gaining fans for like twenty-five to thirty years after that.
If a character is popular for thirty years, at any point along that timeframe people are jumping in. If someone became a fan of Mega Man in 2005, when he was still very active, it doesn't mean they care about or even played Contra. At that point in time, it would've been likelier they were also a fan of Halo or GTA or something. Meanwhile, in 2005, you have far fewer people becoming fans of a now pretty low-key series like Contra.
And keep in mind 2005 was the year of the poll that got Mega Man included. Dude was getting multiple games a year; it wasn't "the retro crowd" who got him in, it was a fanbase that spanned four gens of active releases.
Because most of these "retro" series are just successful series that began during the retro era. But so are, like, Mario, Zelda and Metroid. If you're a Zelda fan, but you started on the 64, that doesn't mean you would inherently care about, like, Ghosts n Goblins.
It's the additional eras, with the games therein, which gave series like Mega Man, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, etc. the requisite, higher volume of support to elevate them to the point where inclusion was feasible. It's existing across enough gens successfully that they have both an audience size and an audience still active enough that can push for them. If it was just being retro, we'd have gotten a third-party who fell off after that era yet still retained enough demand to be included. Other than
maybe Pac-Man, depending on how you see his post-retro catalogue, there aren't any.
That's why it won't be Rizer after Hayabusa. He's not going to have enough popularity to offset the state of his series, because demand isn't based on some fixed year. The people who want Hayabusa aren't just those who played Ninja Gaiden in 1989, it's everyone who came to his series in the last thirty-something years, including when it was pretty popular but very different in the 00s, who might have a completely unrelated catalogue of games they care about than what released in his proximity fifteen years before they even played the series.
That's the distinction between a series popular across decades versus one that faded after the retro era, and separates the Hayabusas from the Rizers.
