Son Goharotto and me.

There isn't much between us at all. As a matter of fact I have benefited greatly from his hard work and he hasn't benefited at all from me using his work.

It was back in 2004 when I stumbled across the site that Son Goharotto had at the time. On it was a Mega Man 8 styled Rush Adapter. The thought popped in my head to repaint it black and viola Nega Man. That character only appeared for a year in the other project and was promptly forgotten until 2013. Jeseka is still a very integral part of the other project and will be for the foreseeable future. Especially since I have yet to really close out the stories I started in 2005.

What was I talking about? What's his face? OH! Son Goharotto. When I was getting done posting the sprites from Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel (I have a file folder whose sole purpose is to copy/paste that name) I had to figure out the next group of sprites to post. I had the Dr. Light, Dr. Wily, Skull Man, and Mega Man but I remember there being more and I needed to double check my memory of them being public domain. Off to the Internet Archive.

Lucky for me (or so I thought) Son Goharotto had websites posted on his sprite sheets. I did find a couple of more sprites in the Internet Archive, but a few were not saved. On the plus side at least my suspicions about them being public domain were confirmed. (I think I should do a post about what I think the differences are between free use and public and why I don't use the phrase public domain.) Then I decided to try and ask him. That's hit or miss. I've had some luck getting in touch with people, and a lot of no luck. This time I was lucky and Son Goharotto sent me the entire collection. YIPPIE!

Now the real work begins. First thing I did was convert the GIFs into PNGs because GIF sucks.

It sucks because after twenty years Microsoft has yet to figure out how to program MS Paint to handle the GIF format. Second I changed the file names to the name of the sprite sheet and his name so I can find them easier in my folders and see the links in my stat reports. Plus it's better overall for SEO. I did alter a few of the sprites to fix mistakes and added double sized versions to beef up the look.

A little funny aside. In an email I told Son Goharotto that I maybe have gotten some of his sprites off of his sites. I thought that may not have been entirely true. I was sure I had seen his name prior to 2004 but I couldn't quite remember. On a trip through the Internet Archive I found him, he had made submissions to The People's Sprites back in 2003. By the way, I did check the Internet Archive for the site listed on the sprite sheets he gave me and the entire set was there. I told Son Goharotto I felt a little stupid for having to have bothered him.

Final thought: I did do a Google Search for Son Goharotto and found his Deviant Art and his contributor index for The Sprite Database, but not the sprites I was looking for. Now when you do a Google Search, the results are nice and polluted with my sites.