Overview

Mega Man (known in Japan as Rockman) was developed by a small, six-person team within Capcom. The team did not have a traditional hierarchy, instead being described as a “melting pot” of ideas and equality. Mega Man was truly a sum of everyone’s contributions. Game planner Akira Kitamura (credited as A.K.) was largely the project’s driving creative force, conceptualizing everything from Mega Man himself to the Robot Masters, as well as developing and writing the story, primarily through the game’s instruction booklet and promotional materials.

“Normally when I make a game,” said Kitamura, in a 2011 interview with illustrator Hitoshi Ariga, “the first thing I think about is the gameplay system. But with Mega Man, I actually had an idea of the story and gameworld before that…nothing fully formed, but an idea. In an action game, I don’t think the story should interrupt the action. But I still wanted to show the wider world and story in other places: the back of the box, the instruction manual, advertising, magazine features, and so forth. I wrote all the text for those.”

Although Kitamura amicably departed Capcom during the early planning stages of Mega Man 3, he and the rest of the team’s decades’ old interviews reveal a deep insight into the creation and design philosophy behind the Mega Man series.