/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8201559
Zero was never awoken during the classic timeline. According to both the timeline I linked and the Complete Works books (as well as the Kodansha Chou Hyakka Rockman & Rockman X books), Zero's program was too unstable and out of control and Wily never got to finish Zero (he died before he could, it's why Zero in X1 is incomplete compared to the schematics which look like Zero does on X2 onwards).
Wily died, but between classic and X, there was a robot ban, and it's the reason why Dr. Light no longer had "anyone to look after X", hence Robot Masters being replaced by the simple-minded no-free-will Mechaniloids until Dr. Cain's discovery and flawed reverse engineering of X.

"The Cataclysm" and other such nonsense was created by Dave Anez as his own pet-theory about what happened between Classic and X (as back in the day we didn't had the sources and people with actual knowledge of Japanese for all this information), and it was never meant to be taken seriously outside the context of Bob and George: The Comic Strip.