For almost as long as I’ve been playing video games, I have held the Megaman franchise on a pedestal atop a pillar atop a tower with seemingly never-ending steps winding towards the top. Even when it was clear the series had begun to lose steam and ideas were being rehashed, I was still all for it because it meant more Robot Masters. As a kid and even today I love the concept of bosses in video games, these greater menaces that the player needs to overcome in order to gain safe passage to the next part of the game, and Megaman was king of this. Hearing news that Megaman 9 would be out this Monday, the 22nd of September, I took it upon myself to celebrate in a number of ways. I downloaded Megaman 2 on the virtual console today and beat it within a few hours. I also began to make sprites out of the many, many robot master designs I had thought up as a child, one of the first being the one you saw above, the creatively named “Garbageman.”

The hideousness of the Western Megaman art boxes has become relatively common knowledge by this point. Capcom even decided to parody it by making Megaman 9 box art resemble these fiascos. As a kid, I always thought something wasn’t quite right with the Megaman 2 cover, where a macho-looking guy in blue holding a futuristic pistol stands prominently. I knew this wasn’t what we were expected to see when we saw Megaman’s wide-eyed sprite blink and run and die over and over. Years later, I obtained Megaman 8 for the Sega Saturn, and watched the intro sequence involving Megaman fighting select robots from each of the seven previous Megaman games in full animation. It was at that moment that the intended “style” of the Megaman series hit me: “Megaman is anime!” The big eyes, the round faces, the colors, this all came from an anime style. I had gotten into anime in a big way around the time I first started playing Megaman 8, and I was fascinated by the designs, especially of the Robot Masters. Megaman looked like Megaman, but sleek and streamlined without having those features be too prominent a la Battle Network franchise (though I have nothing against that series or its designs). I even started to look for the existence of an actual Megaman anime, thinking the intro couldn’t possibly be the only thing.

Being wowed by fully animated introductions was not new to me even at that point, as years earlier I told my friend to play the intro to Sonic CD on his Sega CD over and over, but Megaman 8 came out at just the right time. Technology in games was steadily improving, allowing games to look more like anime than ever (Guardian Heroes to name one). I was in high school at the time, and thus was big into anime, though definitely not as much as now, and actively sought out things related to anime. And of course it was Megaman, a character whose games I grew up loving. So it was with Megaman that I began to realize just how much companies tried to cover their Japanese origins.

I’m pretty sure that I knew the fact that video game companies in the 80s and 90s didn’t want Americans to know of their Japanese origins, but it was with Megaman though that I investigated this anew. I took a lookat the NES Bionic Commando, and the full body image of (MUTEKI NO) Spencer they’d use at the end of levels, and realized that it definitely had some anime influence to it. I opened up an old issue of Nintendo Power and saw a title, Clash at Demonhead. At the beginning of the section was a large, colored image displaying a blond guy in armor and weapons done in a very cartoony style. Near it however was screenshots from the game’s intro, with character designs reminiscent of late-80s, early 90s anime such as Mikimoto or Takahashi’s stuff. And there were not one, but two Golgo 13 games, though I don’t think the steps taken to cover up Golgo’s origins were too extensive.

I find it amazing how much FULLY ANIMATED INTRO SEQUENCE FOR VIDEO GAMES were able to influence me and many others. Seeing the intro for the Sega Saturn Magic Knights Rayearth game in a store, I cared little for what the actual game was like. It was these intros that gave an air of legitimacy to games, and also provide plenty of fodder for fanfiction, which they most definitely did. These intros, prior to having games simply look that good all the time, provided enough of an inspiration to construct and elaborate everything necessary for creative endeavors.

If you look at the Megaman 9 official art though, the designs in even the official art have gone all the way back to 2, with a chubbier Megaman at the helm. So maybe Megaman 8 was a bit of a lie after all. Perhaps Megaman was anime all along, just not to that extent.

(Dr. Wily Dr. Wily! Dr. Wily Dr. Wily! Dr. Wily Dr. Wily, ohhhh Dr. Wily!)