The Blue Bomber
Who is the Blue Bomber you ask? Well he’s most commonly referred to as Mega Man in North America, but if you’re from Japan, he’s known as Rock Man. Mega Man was first conceived in 1987 when he first appeared in his own title released by Capcom. His popularity grew after the first video game launch to become the company’s primary iconic character in the video game industry among such giants as Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot.
Mega Man games were some of the most challenging games I have ever played in my life. Primarily due to the fact that Mega Man games had what the industry referred to as ‘Nightmare Levels’ where the chosen level will never be played the same way twice. Another factor of Mega Man’s popularity was that the player could gain the robot masters ‘special ability’ after defeating them in battle for use in later levels. The name ‘Rockman’ was initially conceived by Akira Kitamura, when he took the children’s game of Rock, Paper, and Scissors and applied it to Mega Man, where the Blue Bomber must choose a defeated bosses special ability to use against another boss. The name ‘Rock Man’ didn’t carry over well to North America due to the fact his robotic female counter partner ‘Roll’ never appeared in the game. Her absence made it confusing to the marketing team, thus the name Mega Man was chosen instead for the North American franchise. Over time Mega Man developed other ‘standard’ abilities that the player utilized from the start of the game like sliding and then charging up the ‘Mega Buster’ to release a large plasma projectile to make the game more challenging to play.
Mega Man’s universe slowly spun off other amazing titles like Mega Man X, The Power Battle and went on to appear in numerous other Nintendo titles as a playable character. Mega Man’s popularity grew to such a huge following that he had an appearance in a short lived animation show called Captain N: The Game Master, and finally his own animation series Mega Man: The NT Warrior. The clean lines and attention to detail that Keiji Inafune uses in Mega Man universe to depict Akira Kitamura robot creations really drew me into the Mega Man franchise, which is why I’m such a fan! My favourite robot baddie out of the entire universe has got to be Guts Man. Something about a huge marauding robot flinging cubes of crushed metal at your head really speaks to me.
If you’re interested in playing Mega Man there are lots of emulators out there online or if you can track down a copy of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Xbox you can play all 10 Mega Man titles on your Xbox 360.
Happy Robot Hunting!
Mega Man is copyright of Capcom
You must be logged in to post a comment.