Okay, here’s a quick catch-em-up for people who were dead, too dumb to avoid playing outside, or poor in the 90’s:
Mega Man is a robot dude. I know, it should probably be called Mega Robot. But this shit is all from Japan, so we have to cut them some slack. In fact, I think that the original Nintendo games being so goddamn hard might have been some sort of payback for the whole atomic bomb thing.
Anyway, Mega Man is a robot built by Dr. Light. Dr. Light built Mega Man to fight bad robots created by Dr. Wily (which, by the way, lots of dumb kids pronounced “Dr. Willy.” Fuck you, idiots. Fuck you Andy, especially, because no matter how many times I explained the word “wiley” to you, you always insisted that he was named, in essence, “Dr. Penis.”) So Mega Man would have to fight these different robots.
When you play the game, you start by selecting a stage, a screen that looked something like this:
Then, you could pick which level you went to, each level ending with one of the Robot Masters shown here. Actually, let me rephrase that: You could then select which stage you wanted to spend the next fifteen minutes repeatedly dieing in in innovative, frustrating ways that would take you to a level of anger you didn’t even know the human head could contain.
If by some chance you managed to beat one of the guys, like maybe your older brother was home for the summer or you had a Game Genie, you then gained that Robot Master’s power. So if you beat CutMan, you could shoot out little scissors. If you beat Fireman you could shoot out flames. If you beat Gutsman…well, I never even got goddamn close to that, but I assume you end up with some kind of strongness power instead of the power to make your guts shoot out or something.
Today we are going to begin by looking at some of the covers for the various Mega Man games.
Here is the first cover:
Now this looks like a pretty exciting goddamn game. Explosions, futuristic shit, guns. I’m not really sure why Mega Man looks like a hard-boiled detective with an addiction to Pepcid, nor why he is dressed like a character from Rollerball, nor why he seems to be walking around in a giant pinball machine, but I guess that’s part of the magic of the 90’s. One thing you will notice if you study video game covers, especially older ones, is that you really get good sense of what great imaginations artists had and what little ability we had to express them electronically. Because, after all, Mega Man looked like this:
So you can see how there was a definite disconnect. But, much like cartoons that featured opening sequences with more action, better animation, and far more excitement than the actual shows, we liked our shit well-packaged and moderately usable in the 90’s.
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Moving right along, let’s see how they changed things for Mega Man 2:
So we learned a couple things. Adding a coupon to the front cover of the goddamn game was a nice touch, especially considering how much kids Love saving ten bucks. Mega Man, though still not quite the same as this:
at least had some resembelance, especially in the form-fitting blue suit with matching blue underpants. I would like to nominate Mega Man 2 for Juciest Ass in the series. Yum!
Notice also the lava and ladder on the lower part of the cover. That was a nice reminder of the fact that this game was not all about murdering weird robots, but in fact involved dodging a lot of spikes, lava, electricity, and other things you couldn’t shoot in a million years. Also, note Dr. Wily hiding behind one of his robots, the one in purple with a black Speedo. It’s the beginning of a real hate for that asshole.
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Mega Man 3:
Of the covers, this one seems to encompass the series best. Crazy robots, weird skull castle, and the sort of cartoony, boyish face of Mega Man kind of brings things together. Probably most accurate is the look of boyish grin and pleasure at the ruthless killing of another fellow robot. Mega Man looks smug, and a little curious at the hole he’s blown in his robotic brother. And if you’ve ever played this game, killing the other robots is a mixture of pleasure and justified anger.
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Finally, Mega Man 4:
Okay, this one, though graphically fairly pleasing, seems to be an assemblage of random shit. We’ve got Mega Man, so that’s something. Then, in the back, we have Pharaoh Man. Yes, Pharaoh Man. Why they decided that ethnicities were the equivalents of elements such as fire and ice I’m not sure, but here we are. I guess the real question is why they decided to put him on the cover. I guess the real answer to that real question probably comes in the form of two words: Toad Man. Additionally, we can see in the background a weird snail creature. The snail looks sort of pissed, but sort of bored. Kind of the way you felt after three hours of Mega Man.
Oh, and then planets. Fuck if I know why.