Cyberspace is a ghostly concept, but its premise is simple. There are two overlapping worlds, one made of molecules and one made of bits. Our bodies exist in the tangible world, but another realm envelops and eludes us all at once. Conjured somewhere in the air between computers is cyberspace, the ethereal domain of data. A place where the limits of the physical can be transcended. Somewhere we can only glimpse the shadow of through the medium of our screens.
When the internet still seemed exciting and mysterious, this spatial metaphor was understandably popular. It’s easier to imagine the internet as a new location in your head then it is to contend with the unfathomable distance of cable conveying an unending series of electromechanical exchanges to induce it. You surfed the web like an ocean. You navigated its pages like a book. It was all these things and more. Every direction seemed to extend into a multitude of possibilities.
Just after the turn of the century, at the peak of all things ”cyberspace,” Capcom would release Mega Man Battle Network for the Japanese launch of the Game Boy Advance. The game is an ambitious real-time RPG with a battle system that’s easy to grasp, yet full of strategic depth. But far before the “internet of things" was a common term, the game's setting managed to stand out by taking it as far as possible. In its deliberately vague future of “20XX,” everything from household appliances to major infrastructure is networked together across an expansive virtual space—the Cyberworld. People work hand-in-hand with NetNavis, humanoid programs who exist in this space.
This all makes for a rather convenient excuse to provide the player with obstacles. Viruses to battle run amok. Each scenario introduces a new hacker saboteur, where ovens are vandalized to catch fire, buses to are rigged to explode, military’s satellites are hijacked to launch missiles, you name it. Luckily, all these dastardly schemes are thwarted by the only people seemingly up to the task, the two player characters. You routinely switch between the cocky 5th grader Lan Hikari and his NetNavi MegaMan.EXE to navigate the two isometric overworlds that make up their respective realms of existence.
The real world is cartoonish, but aside from the occasional goofy-looking futuristic machine, it has a surprising sense of verisimilitude. Even with some asset reuse, there are small details placed effectively throughout each location. Dex, one of Lan’s schoolmates, has an appropriately messy room littered in candy wrappers and manga. There’s even a GameCube, complete with a matching controller that’s been left perfectly askew.
In contrast, the Cyberworld is positively barren. Every environment is a series of winding avenues that float untethered in a void, coated with a poppy techno-psychedelia aesthetic. The majority of these are discrete networks that have been sabotaged, left for you to navigate to the end of and defeat the offending NetNavi there. Like so many RPG dungeons, there’s a weaving but ultimately linear progression, with the occasional detour for the player compelled to open every chest.
The rest of the Cyberworld consists of sixteen interconnected areas referred to as the (capital-I) ”Internet”. You’re constantly returning to them over the course of the game. For Mega Man Battle Network, the Internet is the hub that bridges every network location. Unlike the dungeons, there’s a real non-linear quality to the layout. Pathways jut out and overlap like endless circuity, twisting every which way into more and more obscure corners. Between the GBA’s minuscule screen and the lack of any map, the space almost seems like it could go on forever. Even when you’re hopelessly lost, it feels like you could stumble onto anything. Boundless Network, the aptly titled song that plays there, captures this romantic sentiment perfectly.
This gets at the heart of the cyberspace zeitgeist. Even in its most dystopic depictions, Cyberspace was imagined as a place of possibility. We had all the possibility extracted from our world, so we concocted another filled with it. But despite this earlier framing, the internet has had all the possibility taken from it as well, having been almost wholly commodified and monopolized. The mainstream internet has only one cardinal direction now—down, the descent into an unending maw of content. There were plenty of attempts made to realize the promise of a truly spatial internet, but most of them fizzled out or remain niche.
At the most basic level, Mega Man Battle Network’s internet areas are appealing because they’re evocative. They do this by building on what was an evocative concept. There’s not much criticality or insight here, beyond the overall “technology like this could probably be used to cause a lot of trouble” bit that drives the plot. Trying to take a consumer product designed for children to task for the failures of what it inspired is a ridiculous endeavour. Speculative fiction is a graveyard where the possibilities of the past have been laid to rest and Mega Man Battle Network’s setting is far from the only naive future interned there. Even so, sometimes you find yourself wandering the gap between them and the present, getting lost in what could have been.
