No Rock Man. No Guts Man. No Cut Man. And yet the unlicensed bootleg Mega Man Pro app that popped up on Apple’s download store recently has notched 150 five-star recommendations from various users. It doesn’t deserve them.
Watch the video above to get a short tour of the bogus Blue Bomber game available for iOS devices. Offered by Idea House, it costs $0.99 and is apparently made by one Sergey Tikhonov, who calls himself an indie developer. And while his personal site shows various game projects, none of them appear to be using popular characters from established companies. Heading over to Tikhonov’s GitHub page, you can see code for trying to replicate at least one popular iOS game but that’s not something that’s been made available commercially.
Like the shady vendors of the fake Pokémon Yellow and One and One Story games, Idea House appears to the latest App Store purveyor trying to slip one past Apple and the intellectual property owner of a more popular game franchise. Unlike the Pokemon fiasco, Mega Man Pro is actually playable. By comparison, whereas the One and One theft resembles the original very closely, MMP isn’t anything like the Mega Man games it touts on the product page.
And yes, it’s easy to grab attention and cash from rubes with a scam app, but you have to wonder if the coders behind these travesties simply can’t turn out their own better executed ideas. With each Pokéfake or Mega Scam that makes it way onto an iPad, Apple runs the risk of being seen as lax when it comes to policing the content coming down its gigantic money-making pipeline.
Leave a Reply