I believe X7 and X8 deal with it quite soundly.

Sorry

I don\'t think Capcom cared enough to say what happened to him, or to Mega Man, or to Roll, or for that matter, to ANY of the classic-series characters other than Light and Wily. And even so, information on Light is limited to the fact that he built X and he has semi-sentient holographic images of himself in capsules, and information on Wily is very very sketchy at best.

Maybe they\'re keeping the storyline open so that they can create more games for whenever. Heh, not like this series ever had a serious canon timeline to it (unlike the Castlevania series, for example).

That, and I can personally (by myself, as a fan) throw out whatever events or games I deem are non-canon. I deem the Mega Man & Bass game non-canon anyway, so due to my ability to throw things out of canon, I\'ve kinda stopped caring.

Back to the topic, though, Light likely died or found some way to transfer his brain into a computer (coughMetroidcoughFusioncough), such that his capsules could help X in 21XX. Wily--well, whatever happened to him is blech.

One can only guess that robots probably continued in the style of Mega Man, and possibly met some advancement, but then one day (likely many years after Light\'s passing away) Dr. Cain was investigating the area formerly of Light\'s lab, and found X.

(This also leads me to think that Light likely lived somewhere near a fault line, say on the US west coast, and shortly after his death an earthquake rolled through and leveled his property.)

Then all the events of the X series, starting from X1, happened.

I can offer absolutely no ideas as to what happened to major classic-series characters like MM, Roll, Rush, Protoman, Bass, Treble, Eddie, Tango, Beat, etc..