Video Game Icons: Mega Man

Origins

In the middle of 1987, Capcom came up with a simple idea. Simple on paper, anyway. It involved having a character running around the screen and shooting down robots in gameplay similar to Super Mario Bros. Sure, it had been done before in arcade games from early in the 1980s, such as Berzerk, Frenzy, Galaga, and Space Invaders, but thanks to the advance of technology and the title-based graphics format, it was now possible to do this in a side-scrolling platformer.

Rockman's origins were the brainchild of Keiji Inafune (even though he insists his mentor had the basic details down before he entered the company), who was credited in Capcom's early video game efforts as "Inafking." He had recently graduated from college and Joined Capcom's creative team for the original [i]Street Fighter[/i] as an artist. It wasn't long before Capcom took seriously the idea of some guy running around with a laser gun shooting down robots, and Capcom decided to put the idea - and Inafune - to the test.

Making The Game

The game consisted of months of grueling work. There were only six people on the development team, and the lead designer wanted Capcom's best forward, wanting perfection in every aspect. Inafune was waring multiple hats at once - he came up with almost all the character designs as well as the box art, the instruction manual, and the sprite rendering. The first character deisgn Inafune worked on was Elec Man. Just like Elec Man, the villians were based on American comic book characters.

The Nintendo Entertainment System, of course, still had quite a few restrictions as to what one could do. The most notoious was the fact that sprites could only consist of a few colors out of the NES's 56-color palette. Blue had the most shades, and Capcom made their hero blue to give him more detail. The design worked so well that when the series made the jump to 16- and 32- bit, the default color schematic stuck. Naoya Tomita (credited in the game as "Tom-Pon") worked on backgrounds immediately after his training stint at Capcom; by maximizing use of background elements, he was able to bring details to the game. Manami Matsumae (credited in the game as "Chanchacorin") did the score and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi (credited as "Yuukichan's Papa") did sound management and programming. Matsumae composed the music and sound effects and programmed it all in three months. The music had to be converted one note at a time into machine language.

Capcom went through several names, including Mighty Kid, Knuckle Kid and Rainbow Man before they okayed Rockman.

A Game Like No Other

A lot of ideas came out of this game. The most notorious innovation of them all was the acquisition of bosses' (or Robot Masters', as they would be called) weapons, as well as the "rock-paper-scissors" nature under which they would work - one weapon would be a Robot Master's main weakness, other weapons were not as effective on said Robot Master, and not one would dominate the others. While we take this for granted nowadays, this was a radical idea as it was logical back then.

This game led to another first in the world of video games: the very first non-linear stage select screen. As soon as you pressed Start, you could choose any Robot Master you wanted. Not only did this lead to umpteen amounts of "Beat this Robot Master First" challenges that evolved into "Beat the Whole Game With the Mega Buster" challenges, it became the first stepping stone to non-linear, sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto and Driver that would come around ten-plus years later.

Inauspicious Beginnings

Interestingly enough, sales of the game were moderately low when the game was first released. However, the game did better than Capcom expected, allowing for a sequel to be made. Mega Man 2 would
 consist of a lot of design elements that didn't make into the original game due to a lack of space. This game would be the one that would seal the deal and make Mega Man one of the best selling video game franchises ever.

Even though the game was meant solely for the Japanese market, Capcom decided to see how the game would do in America...

Coming To America

Rockman would not be released in North America until December 1987. Joseph Marici, then the Senior Vice President of Capcom in America, did not like the original name and came up with the Westernized title Mega Man. The name was well-liked enough to be used in future entries of the series in the West.

When the game made its way overseas, the box art was changed to reflect Western tastes of the time. The cover art was blamed on the game's lack of initial prosperity. Just like in Japan, the game's sales were modest, but the game received critical nods for graphics that were better than what there was at the time as well as the "rock-paper-scissors" weapon system and decent play control.

Legacy

Even though it did slightly better than Capcom expected it to, it was an inauspicious start ot a video game series of massive proportions. The game was such an interesting curiousity that, as time passed, Capcom re-released it in September 1991 due to overwhelming demand.

Mega Man brought a fresh breath of air at the outset, and as it progressed, the storylines, the graphcis, the sound and music, the play control - everything across the board would be improved. Mega Man would not only prove to become one of Capcom's biggest moneymakers, it would prove itself as a video game icon.