Okay, as promised! I removed the bit about this game being a modified Mega Man 5. I went and did some research into this widely-accepted fact, the results of which are in this Twitter thread.
If you don't want to read the whole thing, the TLDR is I believe this is a case of Wikipedia citogenesis. Many years ago, someone added this fact, unsourced, to the Wikipedia article, which also contained a bunch of (wrong!) information about the game at the time. Eventually, the wrong information got removed...but not this fact, which only acquired a "citation needed" tag in 2016, ***10 years*** after it was first added to the article. That was plenty of time for people to read the article, decide "Yeah that makes sense", and spread it both on and offline. Finally, in 2019, the fact had a source linked to it on Wikipedia....a fanblog (Which doesn't usually meet Wikipedia sourcing requirements), uploaded in 2015, which didn't actually support the statement, instead only saying "The game uses the same engine as Capcom’s Megaman series[...]" and itself offered no backing evidence for this.
Lastly, Darkwing Duck actually came out 6 months **before** Mega Man 5—June 1992 versus December 1992. That timeline doesn't make sense to me to have it be using a modified Mega Man 5 engine.
I can see how this fact spread around—there are similarities between the games, and writing games in assembly was hard. I'd be shocked if some code wasn't reused from game to game. But it's a long way from that to "This game runs on a modified Mega Man 5 engine", even ignoring the philosophical arguments about "What even **was** an 'engine' in the days of assembler programming?"
So I removed it from the Wikipedia article, and I'm removing it here too, at least until someone comes up with a developer interview or something confirming it.
Okay, as promised! I removed the bit about this game being a modified Mega Man 5. I went and did some research into this widely-accepted fact, the results of which are in this Twitter thread
.
If you don't want to read the whole thing, the TLDR is I believe this is a case of Wikipedia citogenesis. Many years ago, someone added this fact, unsourced, to the Wikipedia article, which also contained a bunch of (wrong!) information about the game at the time. Eventually, the wrong information got removed...but not this fact, which only acquired a "citation needed" tag in 2016, ***10 years*** after it was first added to the article. That was plenty of time for people to read the article, decide "Yeah that makes sense", and spread it both on and offline. Finally, in 2019, the fact had a source linked to it on Wikipedia....a fanblog (Which doesn't usually meet Wikipedia sourcing requirements), uploaded in 2015, which didn't actually support the statement, instead only saying "The game uses the same engine as Capcom’s Megaman series[...]" and itself offered no backing evidence for this.
Lastly, Darkwing Duck actually came out 6 months **before** Mega Man 5—June 1992 versus December 1992. That timeline doesn't make sense to me to have it be using a modified Mega Man 5 engine.
I can see how this fact spread around—there are similarities between the games, and writing games in assembly was hard. I'd be shocked if some code wasn't reused from game to game. But it's a long way from that to "This game runs on a modified Mega Man 5 engine", even ignoring the philosophical arguments about "What even **was** an 'engine' in the days of assembler programming?"
So I removed it from the Wikipedia article, and I'm removing it here too, at least until someone comes up with a developer interview or something confirming it.