Passing the Mega Man Torch: Remembering the Transition from Classic to X

It all started here:

A tweet from @ZEDIC0N which stated the following:

okay so I knew that Mega Man X came out before Mega Man 7 but I had no idea that BOTH Mega Man X AND X2 came out before MM7

X2 came out on the 16th of December 1994

7 came out just over three months later on the 24th of March 1995

Which then explains this…

This prompted a response from me:

Raise your hand if, prior to this, you thought the Classic series was done with 6, and “to be continued” referred to X1.

Turns out I was a bit alone in my thinking, it would seem. Others replied, I tried to explain my position, but… Twitter? Not a great platform if you’ve got a bit to say. And me? I’ve got a bit to say.

Fortunately for me, I’ve got a place to say it.

So please, allow me to lay out for you what it was like — for me, at least — in the age before the internet was prominent, as the world transitioned from Nintendo to Super Nintendo, and the path Mega Man took to get there.

In the earliest reports of Mega Man’s jump to 16-bit — often phrased like that — the title was referred to as “Super Mega Man.” With little else to contextualize it than our favorite blue robot going from 8-bit to 16-bit, we didn’t have a clue of what else to expect — least of all, a whole new character. Amusingly, the original Mega Man would adopt the “Super Mega Man” moniker when he made the jump to 16-bit himself in Mega Man 7, thanks to the newest Rush Adapter. (And no, I’m not counting Mega Man Soccer, technicalities aside.)

The working title didn’t give much indication we would be dealing with a new hero, either. Lots of games that made the jump to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had the “Super” prefix, but starred the same heroes we knew and loved: Super Adventure Island, Super Bomberman, Super Castlevania IV, Super Double Dragon, Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Super Mario World… okay, maybe that last one isn’t the best example. Suffice to say, it was the style at the time, and that was but a handful. It didn’t mean anything.

Eventually, we did get some new information: a new title, Mega Man X, and some new images. This was where it got interesting for me.

Check it out. It’s tough to make out the details there, unless you know how X normally looks. And at the time, we hadn’t seen artwork of an un-upgraded, basic X.

What I saw were a lot of segments. Segments that reminded me of something…

Suffice to say, going into the ’90s, Mega Man had a very specific look, at least as presented by Capcom USA. Very segmented, yes?

Yeah, that’s right. When I first saw screens of Mega Man X, I thought I was looking at the new pixel personification of the same Blue Bomber that had adorned several box covers and strode across the floor of the Consumer Electronics Shows that had been happening right around that time. What was there to say any different? Heck, even Game Players magazine ran with the idea on the front of their issue featuring Mega Man X and Sonic the Hedgehog CD cover stories!

Of course, as time went on, more looks at X would reveal that his design was, in fact, quite different, despite being deliberately reminiscent of the Blue Bomber we all had come to know and love by that point.

As the time of release drew closer, something interesting cropped up: Mega Man 6.

Back in the day, magazine coverage typically coincided with a video game’s release month. By all accounts, as Mega Man X was poised to come out in January 1994 as the cover story for Volume 56 of Nintendo Power magazine, December 1993’s Volume 55 featured six pages of Mega Man 6 coverage, all ending on a teaser for Mega Man X the following issue. It felt like a perfect way to close out the old series on the old hardware, and start with the new series on the new hardware — a concept that would indeed follow through with in later years (shout out to Nobleboy77 for bringing that to my attention).

Of course, the game wouldn’t come out for a little while after it was featured in Nintendo Power (that’s another story), but when it did come out, three little words left an enigmatic impression:

Wily was behind bars. What would happen next?

“To be continued,” to me and my young mind, was referring to Mega Man X. Mega Man had done what he needed to do, the book was closed on that saga, and now it was time for a new adventure in a new era. Sure, Mega Man 5 for Game Boy would come later the following year and poke a hole in this theory, but one could reason that it broke the subseries staple of coming after the subsequently numbered game in the NES series and took place before Wily went to jail (which, incidentally, is still the only way it really works).

At the time, a popular conception was that Mega Man and X were one in the same. I think the prevailing logic was, “Why would Dr. Light make another robot just like Mega Man when he has Mega Man right there?!” And as noted above, our pixelated heroes usually made the console leap with us in some way. So a lot of fan art, comics, fanfic, and other such things ran with the idea that X was just an upgraded Mega Man.

It was an idea reinforced by the video game magazines of the time, with articles and such written with Capcom’s support. And Capcom USA made little effort to throw any cold water on the idea, as in addition to their own mixed messaging, they didn’t even really expand upon X’s character until Mega Man X3. Even Mega Man X2 favored calling him “Mega Man” as much as it did “X”!

It was a strange time, to say the least. From 1987 to 1993, we had been getting Mega Man games more or less annually, and Mega Man X seemed to pick up right where Mega Man 6 stopped in that regard. Sure, Capcom said that the regular line would continue (see above image), but as noted at the top of the article, it wasn’t until around the same time as Mega Man X3 was in the news cycle that we began to hear about Mega Man 7, the actual continuation of the story left off in Mega Man 6!

It was a very different time, too. No internet (at least, not in wide use) meant no peeks at Japanese releases and interviews with the creators, painstakingly translated into English so we could have some idea of what they were thinking. Mega Man merchandise, info, and material of any kind beyond the games was sparse, when compared with today. That meant we were left with a jumbled mess of info to put together into something logical and coherent for ourselves. I hope that at least gives some idea of why I saw things the way I did at the time.

Oh, and don’t @ me about Mega Man’s Soccer. Despite being released on the Super NES, it didn’t feature anyone past Mega Man 4, anyway. The Ruby-Spears Mega Man cartoon cut off at Mega Man 5, so it felt like an earlier production. And the Game Gear Mega Man… Capcom didn’t even develop or publish it, did anyone think that counted for anything?

Since all this happened, I’ve obviously come a long way in my thinking. Maybe part of that initial idea was not wanting to leave a childhood hero behind, but with both series running together, I didn’t have to! This is probably a contributor to my affinity for legacy heroes, too.

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