Blaster Master - Legacy

Legacy

At the 1992 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sunsoft announced that they were planning to develop a sequel for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but it never came to be. Instead, Software Creations developed the North American–exclusive sequel Blaster Master 2 for the Sega Genesis. Later releases include Blaster Master Boy for the Game Boy, Blaster Master: Enemy Below (released in Japan as MetaFight EX) for the Game Boy Color, and Blaster Master: Blasting Again for the PlayStation. A re-imagining of the first game, Blaster Master: Overdrive, was released for Nintendo's WiiWare service in North America on February 8, 2010 (2010-02-08).

Scholastic Books published a novelization of Blaster Master, written by Peter Lerangis under the pen name "A.L. Singer". The book was part of the Worlds of Power series – a collection of loose novelizations of various NES games. He wrote similar novelizations for Ninja Gaiden, Infiltrator, and Bases Loaded II: Second Season. As with the other books in the series, all acts of violence portrayed in the games, including any death scenes, were removed. As a result, the bosses were portrayed in the book as "holographic projections placed over formless blobs". Shawn Struck and Shawn Sharkey from 1UP.com said that Blaster Master was the hardest book for Lerangis to write because of the lack of a middle plot; he had to come up with details that were not in the game to connect the game's actual opening and conclusion. Sunsoft would use Lerangis' novel as the plot for the game's sequel, Blaster Master: Blasting Again, making the novel the only one in the Worlds of Power series to be canonized in a video game series.

In a 2010 interview with Iwata, he was surprised about the game's reception outside Japan, which retrogamers have named it as one of their favorite and most memorable 8-Bit titles. He said: "It’s kind of funny that the first time I ever really had any sense of the game’s success was about 10 years following the original release of Blaster Master, when a young staff member from the U.S. office said something to me like, 'You’d definitely have become a super famous game designer if you were an American.'" Alex Neuse, creator of the Bit.Trip series, reminisced his memories of playing Blaster Master as a child. He acknowledged that the game was a clone of Metroid that featured a tank that could jump and a corny storyline, but he said it was all "presented in a way that it felt meaningful". He added that the game's music convinced him "that video game music could be high-quality, memorable, and evocative". 1UP.com listed the game as the 11th best NES game of all time in its "Top 25 NES Games" list; the 1UP.com staff said the game was "an action game that worked like a mishmash of every NES game before it", noting the expansive map like in Metroid. Paste magazine ranked Blaster Master as the 2nd greatest NES game of all time, behind The Legend of Zelda; they cited the tank's additional abilities as a main reason behind its ranking.

On December 15, 2010, SOPHIA the 3rd made an appearance in the Flash game Super Mario Bros. Crossover, in its Version 1.2 release. In the game, the tank possesses all abilities from Blaster Master and is the first character in the game to have a limited supply of ammunition; players need to collect power-ups from enemies in order to fire homing missiles, which is necessary to defeat Buzzy Beetles, Spike Tops, and Bullet Bills. The version also allows SOPHIA to grapple onto ceilings.