Mega Man
Mega Man is a video game franchise developed and published by Capcom, featuring the protagonist of the same name. The original game was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, and spawned a franchise that expanded to over 50 games on multiple systems. , the series had sold 43 million units worldwide.
Mega Man has been popular among gamers and has been reimagined and evolved as a video game character for over 30 years.
The main series, dubbed the "Classic" series, consists of eleven games, the standalone Mega Man & Bass, the spin-off Game Boy series, and various ports, remakes, and compilations. The storyline of the "Classic" series is succeeded by the Mega Man X, Mega Man Zero, Mega Man ZX, and the Mega Man Legends series, all of which set in a single continuity. Two other series, the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force series, take place in an alternate universe where the internet flourished rather than robotics.
History
1987: Conception and first game
Before Mega Man, Capcom primarily 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 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 people, so after drawing character designs, I was actually doing the dotting 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, 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, " 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 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, who composed the music, created the sound effects, and programmed the data in three months, using a sound driver programmed by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi. 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.
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.com's Nadia Oxford attributed this change to Capcom's belief that American children would be more interested in a game with the latter title.
Capcom's sales department originally believed that the game would not sell, but after Japan had received limited quantities, it had been seen as successful enough to quickly commission an American localization. With little overseas press coverage save for a full-page advertisement in Nintendo Fun Club News, sales gained momentum over word of mouth, making the game a sleeper hit.
1988-1990: Mega Man 2 & 3, and Kitamura's departure
Mega Man was not a large commercial accomplishment for Capcom at the time. According to Roy Ozaki, director Akira Kitamura had wanted to make a sequel to Mega Man, but producer Tokuro Fujiwara was against it. Kitamura then sought permission from Capcom's vice president at the time to make the game. The development team were given permission to develop a sequel on the condition that they work concurrently on other projects as well. The staff spent their own time on the project to improve upon the original by adding more levels and weapons, as well as improving graphics. The project supervisor of the first Mega Man invited Keiji Inafune to the sequel's development crew, as Inafune was working on a separate game at the time. On the previous game, Inafune worked as an artist and character designer but became more involved in the production process of the sequel. "Working on marked my second year at this, and I even got to mentor a 'new kid', which opened up a whole new world of stress for me," Inafune recounted. The development time for the game was only three to four months.Mega Man 2 was a huge success and received critical acclaim. Since its 1988 release, Mega Man 2 has sold over 1.51 million copies worldwide, becoming the second highest selling in the entire Mega Man franchise.
Development on Mega Man 3 began at Capcom over a year after the release of Mega Man 2. Akira Kitamura, the lead supervisor for the first two games quit his job at the company during that gap of time. Keiji Inafune considered Mega Man 3 as one of his least favorite entries in the series due to " what went into the game and what was behind the release of the game." He had "preset notions" about successful development because of the team's good experience with Mega Man 2 and found that his new superior "didn't really understand Mega Man the way his predecessor did". During the game's production, the developers lost the main planner, so Inafune had to take over that job for its completion. Inafune recalled the final two months of development as particularly turbulent, when he had to take responsibility for assessing and dividing up tasks among the team members who were not meeting deadlines. The team was forced to put Mega Man 3 on the market before they thought it was ready, releasing it in September instead of the series' usual arrivals in December. Inafune concluded, "I knew that if we had more time to polish it, we could do a lot of things better, make it a better game, but the company said that we needed to release it. The whole environment behind what went into the production of the game is what I least favored. Numbers one and two – I really wanted to make the games; I was so excited about them. Number three – it just turned very different."
Despite the turbulent development cycle, Mega Man 3 received positive reviews and sales. Since its 1990 release, Mega Man 3 has sold over one million copies worldwide.
1993-2000: SNES and PS1 era - ''Mega Man X'' and ''Mega Man Legends''
The success of the Mega Man series allowed Capcom to continue releasing NES titles well into the 16-bit era. A teaser for an SNES incarnation of the Mega Man series first made its way into a preview of Mega Man 6 in the spring 1993 issue of the Japanese Club Capcom fan magazine. The tentatively titled "Super Mega Man" was originally to have a "fairly large memory configuration and a battery backup"..Mega Man X was announced in North America in a March 1993 Game Players magazine interview with Capcom's Senior Vice President Joseph Morici, marking the beginning of the Mega Man X subseries. Mega Man X was developed by a team at Capcom which had worked on the long-running Mega Man series for the NES. Keiji Inafune recounted that the development of Mega Man X required a lot of brainstorming for its storyline and content, where the team's goal was to branch out from the original Mega Man games while still maintaining their fundamentals. Mega Man X has met with positive reviews for its gameplay, sound, and graphics, as well as its attempt to augment the franchise. Several websites retrospectively held Mega Man X as a successful milestone in transitioning the Mega Man series from its increasingly stale existence on the NES to the SNES. The success of the game led to the development of future Mega Man X titles and the concept of subseries within the Mega Man franchise.
One of the earliest global showings of Mega Man Legends occurred at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, Georgia, in June 1997, where it was titled Mega Man Neo. A demo of the game, titled "Rockman Neo", was later included in the Japanese director's cut version of Resident Evil. Keiji Inafune stated that his goal was to create a new Mega Man game that would be entirely different from previous entries in the series. Aiming to appeal to gamers of all ages, Inafune decided to blend action, RPG, and adventure genres, though he questioned whether the game would still be engaging. All the humanoid characters in the game were animated using motion capture, a first in the franchise.
In December 1997, Capcom USA's president, Bill Gardner, informed IGN that Mega Man Legends would be ported to the Nintendo 64. Although the Japanese name had already been finalized, "Mega Man Neo" remained as the English title, with Gardner stating that the official name had not yet been decided. In January 1998, the game was renamed "Mega Man Nova" due to a general consensus that the previous name was not appealing. However, just two weeks later, the name was reverted due to trademark issues. The final title, Mega Man Legends, was confirmed in March 1998. By April 1998, the English adaptation of the game had been completed, but Capcom chose to delay its release until September of the same year, believing it would perform better during the holiday season.
The game was released in Japan on December 18, 1997, with a re-release under the "PlayStation the Best" label following on May 4, 1999. The game received moderately positive reviews, spawning one spin-off and a sequel.