The Gaming Historian - Mega Man

Capcom, which was founded in 1979 in Osaka, was looking to expand to the home video game market, particularly the popular Nintendo. They had previously released a few ports from their arcade games, such as 1942, but were hoping to create a whole new franchise for the consoles.

At the young age of 22, Keiji Inafune joined Capcom. He had just graduated from college and was looking to become an illustrator. His first project was working on street fighter, but was then assigned to a new project: come up with a hit franchise for the home consoles.Seemed easy right? Not exactly. While Tokuro Fujiwara was the director of the project, Inafune was given the task of designing the characters, instruction booklet, logo, and boxart. He was even responsible for taking his designs and turning them into pixel form. Thus, Keiji Inafune is the creator, and father, of Mega Man. Inafune grew up on anime and decided that characters were going to be important in the game. Not just any characters, but detailed characters. Inafune noticed many NES games that lacked these qualities. "We wanted to make sure that the animation and the motion was realistic and actually made sense."

Inafune was also limited to a 56 color palette. Knowing that he wanted good detail on this character, he chose the color blue, since it had the most colors in the NES palette. Inafune even admits " The Blue Bomber is really blue because of the Nintendo, not anything else."

Platformers and side scrollers were the top games on the NES. Sales charts could tell anyone that. Thus, the game was going to be a side scroller. The concept of the game was based on rock paper scissors, in that every boss and weapon has a different strength and weakness. Inafune's love for music also played a large part in the creation process. Quote, "to base characters on that, that's something that we all can understand, and we can all...buy that concept." Thus, why the japanese know the blue bomber as Rockman. Rockman's sister's name is Roll. Future characters such as Treble and Bass also had names based on musical references. This is also why the music in Mega Man is so incredible. It is an important part of the game.

Rockman was released to the Japanese and Americans in December of 1987. However, Capcom executives in America made a few changes. They didn't really understand WHY he was named Rockman (also because the name Rockman was copyrighted), so they came up with Mega Man instead. Also, the Yellow Devil Boss was renamed to "Rock Monster" due to Nintendo's strict rules of religious referencing. And of course, the most infamous change of all......the cover art. From what I do know, it seems that this cover art was made overnight by Capcom USA's marketing department.

Mega Man was critically acclaimed and sold more than expected, but it was not the huge hit Capcom thought it might become. However, Inafune and everyone involved in the project still felt that the series had life. Capcom gave them another chance, and Mega Man 2 was released in Japan on December 24, 1988 and in North America in July of 1989. The 2nd game in the series was both critically acclaimed and extremely popular. Since Mega Man 2, the series has become Capcoms leading franchise, even beating out Resident Evil. Now, I know there are tons and tons of Mega Man games out there, but for now I just wanted to show you how the blue bomber was created in the first place.