Mega Man, known as in East Asia, is a 1987 platformer game developed and published by Capcom for the NES/Famicom. The first installment in the Mega Man franchise and the original video game series, Mega Man was produced by a small team specifically for the video game console market, a first for Capcom, which up until that point focused on arcade games. It was directed by Akira Kitamura, with Nobuyuki Matsushima as the lead programmer.
The game follows the humanoid robot, Mega Man and his quest to save the world from Dr. Wily and the six "Robot Masters" under his control. Mega Mans nonlinear gameplay lets the player choose the order in which to complete its initial six robot master stages. Each culminates in a boss fight against one of the Robot Masters that awards the player-character a special weapon. Part of the strategy of the game is that the player must choose the order in which to tackle the stages so that they can earn the weapons that will be the most useful for the future stages.
Critics praised Mega Man for its overall design. Mega Man established many of the gameplay, story, and graphical conventions that would define the ensuing sequels, sub series, and spin-offs in the Mega Man series. The game has since been re-released in game compilations such as Mega Man Legacy Collection, ported to iOS/Android, and became a part of console emulation services. A sequel, Mega Man 2, was released 1 year later in Japan and 2 years later in the US. A remake with 3D graphics, titled Mega Man Powered Up/Rockman Rockman, was released for the Sony PSP in 2006.
Plot In the year 200X, robots developed to assist mankind are commonplace thanks to the efforts of the renowned robot designer, Dr. Wright. However, one day, these robots go out of control and start attacking humans, and among them, there are six advanced humanoid robots created by Dr. Wright for industrial purposes. Known as the "Robot Masters", they consist of Cut Man, Guts Man, Ice Man, Bomb Man, Fire Man, and Elec Man. Dr. Wright realizes that the culprit responsible for these attacks is his old rival Dr. Wily, but is unsure of what to do. His helper robot, Rock, has a strong sense of justice and offers to be converted into a fighting robot to stop Dr. Wily's plans, dubbing himself Mega Man.Rockman manual, December 17, 1987, Capcom He eventually defeats all six Robot Masters and recovers their central cores, then confronts Dr. Wily within his Pacific-based robot factory, where he is manufacturing copies of Dr. Wright's robots. After defeating replicas of Dr. Wright's Robot Masters, and several robot masters designed specifically by Wily to defeat him, Mega Man confronts Wily in a final showdown and defeats him before returning home to his family.
The initial Western release of the game has the same plot, and some significantly changed details from the Japanese Famicom manual. In this version, Dr. Wright and Dr. Wily (who is portrayed as Dr. Wright's former assistant) co-create the humanoid robot Mega Man alongside the six Robot Masters, each of whom were designed for the benefit of Monsteropolis's citizens (no such place existed in the original plot). Dr. Wily, angered by Wright taking credit for their work and desiring to use his creations for criminal purposes, steals the Robot Masters and modifies them, then creates his own army of robots to seize control of Monsteropolis and declare it his own personal empire. Dr. Wright, horrified by Dr. Wily's betrayal, sends Mega Man to destroy the Robot Masters and free Monsteropolis from Dr. Wily's machines.
Gameplay
Mega Man consists of six side-scrolling platform levels freely chosen by the player. In each level, the player-character, Mega Man, fights through various enemies and obstacles before facing a "Robot Master" boss at the level's end. Upon defeating the boss, the player assimilates the Robot Master's signature attack, or "Special Weapon", into Mega Man's arsenal for the rest of the game. Unlike the standard Mega Buster (Rock Buster in Japan), the Robot Masters powers have limited ammunition replenished by collecting ammunition cells dropped by defeated enemies at random. Enemies also drop energy cells that replenish Mega Man's health gauge. Though the player is free to proceed through the game in any order, each Robot Master is especially vulnerable to a specific weapon, which encourages the player to complete certain stages before others. The player can also revisit cleared levels (except for Wily levels). Besides the weapons taken from the Robot Masters, the player is able to pick up a platform generator item known as the "Magnet Beam" in Elec Man's stage.
Mega Man features a scoring system where players can score points for defeating enemies, and earn extra points for collecting power-ups from fallen enemies and for clearing each stage. Each Robot Master was worth a random number between 50,000 and 100,000 points whereas Dr. Wily was always worth 200,000 points. The scoring system was removed in later Mega Man games as it was found to provide no meaningful benefit to players and felt unnecessary to designers.
When all six Robot Master stages are completed, the 7th (last) stage appears in the middle of the stage select menu. This stage, in which the player traverses Dr. Wily's robot factory, is a chain of four regular stages linked together, each containing at least one new boss. During these final stages, the six Robot Masters must also be fought again in a predetermined order before the final confrontation against Dr. Wily. As Mega Man's ammo is not restored between stages, every action the player takes is consequential.
Development Before Mega Man, Capcom made arcade games, and its console releases were mostly ports of these games. In the mid-1980s, Capcom made plans to develop Mega Man specifically for the Japanese home console market. They decided to bring in fresh, young talent for the small team, including artist Keiji Inafune, a recent college graduate who started on the Street Fighter team. Inafune recalled that the Mega Man development team worked extremely hard to complete the final product, with a project supervisor and lead designer who sought perfection in every possible aspect of the game.
The development team for Mega Man consisted of only six people. Inafune (credited as "Inafking") designed and illustrated nearly all of the game's characters and enemies, and the Japanese Rockman logo, box art, and instruction manual. He was responsible for rendering these designs into graphical sprite form. He said, "We didn't have [a lot of] people, so after drawing character designs, I was actually doing the dotting (pixelation) for the Nintendo. Back then, people weren't specialized and we had to do a lot of different things because there was so few people, so I really ended up doing all the characters." Inafune was influenced by the eponymous protagonist of Osamu Tezuka's manga Astro Boy in his Mega Man designs. Mega Man is colored blue because it seemed that the color had the most shades in the console's 56-color palette (cyan included), and that selection was used to enhance Mega Man's detail.
Although he is often credited for designing the character, Inafune insists that he "only did half of the job in creating him", as his mentor, director Akira Kitamura, developed the basic character concept before Inafune's arrival. The basic sprites for Roll and Dr. Light were created before Inafune joined the project, and the designs for Cut Man, Ice Man, Fire Man, and Guts Man were in process. Aside from normal enemies, Inafune's first character was Elec Man, inspired by American comic book characters. The artist has commented that Elec Man has always been his favorite design. The designs for Dr. Light and Dr. Wily were based on Santa Claus and Albert Einstein, respectively; the latter character was meant to represent an archetypal "mad scientist".
The team had initially considered names such as "Mighty Kid", "Knuckle Kid", and "Rainbow Man" before settling on their final decisions. The "Rainbow" name was considered because the character could change into seven colors based on the weapon selected. The production team chose a music motif when naming the main characters in Mega Man. The protagonist's original name is Rock and his sister's name is Roll, a play on the term "rock and roll". This type of naming would later be extended to many characters throughout the series. One of the original storylines considered by the team but not used in the final game was to have Roll be kidnapped, and Rock had to rescue her. Another idea had included a boss fight against a giant Roll near the end of the game.
The team decided to incorporate anime elements for the game's animation. Inafune explained, "[Mega Man's] hand transforms into a gun and you can actually see it come out of his arm. We wanted to make sure that the animation and the motion was realistic and actually made sense. So with Mega Man, we had this perfect blending of game character with animation ideas." The gameplay for Mega Man was inspired by the game rock paper scissors. The project supervisor wanted a simple system that offered "deep gameplay". Each weapon deals a large amount of damage to one specific Robot Master, others have little to no effect against them, and there is no single weapon that dominates all the others. Mega Man was originally able to crouch, but the team decided against it since it made players' ability to determine the height of onscreen projectiles more difficult. Naoya Tomita (credited as "Tom Pon") began work on Mega Man'''s scenic backgrounds immediately after his Capcom training. Tomita proved himself amongst his peers by overcoming the challenges of the console's limited power through maximizing the use of background elements.Mega Man was scored by Manami Matsumae (credited as "Chanchacorin Manami"), who composed the music, created the sound effects, and programmed the data in three months, using a sound driver programmed by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi (credited as "Yuukichan's Papa"). The musical notes were translated one by one into the computer language. Matsumae was challenged by the creative limits of three notes available at any one time, and when she was unable to write songs, she created the sound effects. She composed the music to be rock-oriented to fit its action gameplay and robotic protagonist, and to differentiate it from the classical style of other Capcom games.
When the game was localized for distribution in America, Capcom changed the title of the game from Rockman to Mega Man. This moniker was created by Capcom's then-Senior Vice President Joseph Morici, who claimed it was changed merely because he did not like the original name. "That title was horrible," Morici said. "So I came up with Mega Man, and they liked it enough to keep using it for the U.S. games." 1UP.coms Nadia Oxford attributed this change to Capcom's belief that American children would be more interested in a game with the latter title.
Reception