All Rock, No Roll: The Sisterless Early Years of Mega Man

Rock and Roll. Who can name a more iconic duo in video gaming?

Okay, there’s Mario and Luigi… Sonic and Tails… Ken and Ryu… Yoshi and tax evasion…

Look, never mind all those, they’re still pretty dang iconic in their own right. Roll’s popularity is enough to rival her brother, and the series is named for him! If there’s Mega Man merchandise to be had, you can usually count on there being a Roll figure or plush or whatever at some point to sit alongside the Rock equivalent — and in some cases, she even gets her own stuff regardless! Plus, it’s become common enough now that if there’s a new iteration of Mega Man, odds are good there will be a version of Roll right there with him. It’s become difficult to imagine one without the other.

And yet, that’s exactly what it was like in the earliest years of the franchise. Hard as it may be to imagine now, especially if you became a fan later on, for the first several years of the franchise, Roll was effectively a non-entity.

Let’s take a look back.

Now, Roll was present in the very first Mega Man game — for a single screen, at the very end (and I mean the very end, the part where you had to reset back to the title), where she stood for a single frame. Few would have known who she was, because a) She went unnamed, b) She wasn’t mentioned in the manual, and c) How many of us even beat the original Mega Man upon its release?

For my part, the original Mega Man was the first game in the series I ever played, but it wasn’t until after I finished Mega Man 4 that I felt I had the confidence needed to go the distance. Bear in mind, this was before the series had passwords, much less even save files or save states, so it had to be done all in one go. Even the easiest Mega Man games on the NES are considered challenging, so putting Roll solely at the end of the hardest game of the lot meant that for most people, she didn’t exist.

Then came Mega Man 2. She just flat-out was not there. Period. Same for Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge, which came a little bit later.

Now, around this time, Mega Man was appearing in other media — licensed and otherwise — but Roll would not have a presence there, either. In the Worlds of Power: Mega Man 2 novelization/tip book, there is no mention of Roll at all.

Most famously (and infamously), however, was the Blue — er, Green Bomber’s role in Captain N: The Game Master. To that end, one episode titled “Happy Birthday Mega Man” introduced a new character, Mega Girl. Some believe Mega Girl to be the series’ interpretation of Roll, but that seems not to be the case. Per Fil Barlow, who helped develop the show:

“When I prepared this pitch there was no information on the existence of Roll, plus I couldn’t finish the game, especially not in one night, I also didn’t have the skill required. If Nintendo had presented me with any screen art I would have faithfully designed and included them.”

So while she’s functionally similar in some ways (she was stated to simply be Mega Man’s “friend,” rather than sister), it seems to be little more than a coincidence. Not hard to believe, given that the original concept for what would become Captain N: The Game Master was called “Buddy Boy,” and would have featured an entire Mega family, including “his Megamum, Megadad, Megabird and even Megarat.” So imagining a “Mega Girl” later on doesn’t feel like much of a stretch at all.

Incidentally, following her debut episode, she was never seen again.

Another deviation of the time was The Official Guide to Mega Man, by Steven Schwartz. This book, licensed by Capcom, focused on the first three Mega Man games, yet had no mention at all of Roll.

That brings us to the third game, which I think was the first introduction to Roll for a lot of people. She was still not mentioned in the manual, not even in the group shot of Mega Man and all the Robot Masters from the first two games. However, for those who saw the journey through to the end, they were treated with this:

For a brief moment, we get a headshot of Roll as Dr. Light(?) flips through his “Big Book of Robots What I Made.” And we also finally got her name. Well, “finally” might not be appropriate; as noted above, many of us never knew she existed to begin with. This was how we found out.

This was also the point many of us asked “‘Roll’? What kind of name is that?” Because, of course, we did not know that Mega Man’s real name was “Rock” yet.

But that would soon change.

A little over a year later, Mega Man 4 was released, and for the first time, we got the full, real story of the characters we’d been following since 1987 or thereabouts. That Rock was a household robot who didn’t even wear blue before Wily started a fuss. And that he and Dr. Light lived with Roll.

We didn’t get to actually see Roll, though. No, for that, you had to — you guessed it — beat the game, where she waited with Rush for Mega Man to come home by train. (That scene raises a few questions, but we’ll save those for another day, if anyone is interested. Or if I just need something to write about.)

Then came Mega Man 5 and Mega Man 6 and most of the rest of the Game Boy games, and no sign of Roll anywhere. We’d get a peek at her in the intro to the Game Boy Mega Man V in 1995, at least, right before Rock morphs into Mega Man to take on Terra. She’d also feature in the intro to Mega Man’s Soccer (with a speaking part, no less), but

This is largely how it went. The first few years, she was barely a presence, and a little later on, she was more of a presence, but just barely.

The turning point would come in 1993, not from one of Capcom’s video games, but from yet another outside source.

I’m not sure anything did more at the time to introduce Roll to the wider world at large in as prominent a fashion as the 1994 Mega Man cartoon from Ruby-Spears. Say what you want about the cartoon, but it elevated Roll from being barely more than a vague walk-on to a bonafide star. It’s easy to pick at how this version of Roll differs from her game counterpart nowadays, but back then? There really wasn’t much more to differentiate the two than their attire, as RS Roll traded in the red dress for a more action-ready jumpsuit. And she put that outfit to good use, too, as she was often joining Mega Man and Rush on their many adventures, getting into scraps with the Robot Masters and often holding her own.

It wasn’t long after this that she also featured more in newer Mega Man titles. She was not only in the opening animation and intro cutscenes for Mega Man 8, but also ran the shop and was front and center when Mega Man wakes up in the ending. She was a part of the story for Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (which went back to the old kidnapping idea), and even became a playable character in her own right in titles such as Mega Man: Battle & Chase and the first two Marvel vs. Capcom titles, and aside from the Classic series having a bit of a hiccup in releases for… oh, about a decade, it’s all been uphill for her from there.

In the interim, her counterparts Roll Caskett and Roll.EXE helped keep her name fresh in fans’ minds, and in 2006, Mega Man Powered Up helped set things right by not only making her a prominent part of the retold story of the original Mega Man game, but making her a playable character in an alternate scenario and giving her a ton of downloadable outfits to wear, too! The title may read “Mega Man” Powered Up, but it’s no doubt Roll who got her biggest series upgrade to date there.

These days, it’s difficult to imagine the Classic series without her. But just remember, it wasn’t always this way.

Oh, and in case some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Well yeah, that was in the west; she would get shafted here,” it turns out things were not much better in Japan.

As it turns out, though, according to a developer interview from Rockman Character Collection (via Rockman Research Lavatory), Roll would have had a more prominent (if less glamourous) part to play in the original game. There, it was revealed that she was not only to have been kidnapped like the rest of Dr. Light’s robots, but turned into some sort of “giant Roll-chan” who’d appear as a boss.

One can only wonder how the future of the series would have looked, had they gone through with this. Would Roll be rescued, and featured more prominently going forward? Or would we have had to *gulp* destroy her, effectively wiping her from the board for the foreseeable future?

However, once that plan was scrapped, so was most of her presence, and things didn’t improve for a while there. She did get featured in some of the manga released, as of 1992 — five years after the series began. But before that? She had little more there than she did here.

If you’d like more details of how much she was featured in her country of origin (I’d include it here, but I’ve already cleared 1,700 words on the west alone), then I invite you to check out Number 20’s thread on the Social Media Once Known As Twitter, or as I like to call it, “SMOKAT”. He’ll tell you allll about it.

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