During September of 1987, Capcom in Osaka, Japan wanted to expand their home video game market as they had already released some of their other work that were in arcades, but they wanted to make a new franchise for the Famicom or the Nintendo entertainment system in the US.
At the age of 22, Keiji Inafune joined Capcom after graduating from college and wanted to be an illustrator. Hhis first job was on Street Fighter but he was then assigned the task of making a hit original IP for capcom. While Tokodo Fujiwada was the leader of the project, Inafune was the artist for the project, so he’s the father of Mega Man and almost every robot master in the franchise. Inafune’s other job was to turn his illustrations into pixel form. Inafune grew up on anime and he decided that characters were important to the game and he found out that most of the games on the NES lacked those qualities. The Mega man games have won multiple awards and accolades since their 1987 debut.
Inafune has said, “We wanted to make sure that the animation and the motions was realistic and actually made sense…. I felt like a lot of Nintendo characters at that time were lacking detail like Mario, Link, and Kirby, but then you see that the console was not that powerful, especially compared to SEGA with the Genesis’s blast processing power.”
After the release of Mega Man for the NES, it wasn’t a big hit, especially in the West due to the hoard box art, because a lot of video game companies thought that kids and teens didn’t like cutesy things. The team that worked on Mega Man pleaded to let them make a sequel because they knew this series had potential, but Capcom said no until they finally cracked and allowed them to work on it, but only as a side project. Surprisingly, the team worked and got the game ready in three months.
The first game had 6 robot masters: Cut-Man, Guts-Man, Elect-Man, Ice-Man, Fire-Man, and Bomb-Man. The team had added two extra robot masters in the second game and with each game, there are a new set of robot masters and new mechanics and characters. Mega Man’s Dog Rush, for example, can turn into a jet and submarine and be used as a spring, up until Mega Man 6 with the power and flight armor for Mega Man, where he cannot slide, which had started in Mega Man 3. In Mega Man 4, they introduced the charged buster and in Mega Man 7, with finding all the letters R-U-S-H, you can use rush to become Super Mega Man. All these games were made in a span of 3-5 months and within Mega Man 8, they had added a weapon you get without beating a robot master, which was called the mega ball. Then in 2008, Mega Man had removed the slide and charge shot and did the same with Mega Man 10 in 2010 for Wii Ware. The team that made these games were the people who made the Mega Man Zero/zx games. With the teams changing, the game still stayed great with music and robot master design and stories advancing for the classic series.
