From the Foreword to the Players Manual:
Back in 1972, when Paul Elliott and I were working on the original M&M game, a lot of people kept on telling us how silly our idea was and how our game would never get published because nobody would ever be interested in some sort of unrealistic “adventure wargame” - But our weird little game finally got published and caught the imagination of thousands of people around the planet.
Then, during the first years of the M&M odyssey, the same oracles kept on telling that roleplaying games were just a fad and would never survive the eighties. Wrong again. The rolegaming community prospered and here we are, 15 years after, with a new, fully revised version of the M&M rules.