Mega Man creator details how the series came to be

A portion of an interview from 2011, featuring Mega Man manga artist Hitoshi Ariga and Akira Kitamura, the creator of Mega Man...

Kitamura: I joined Capcom as a graphic designer, but very quickly I became seduced by the lure of game design, so I requested a transfer to the planning team. I found out, however, that I still had a lot to learn about games and hardware. After a period of study and working on various projects, the Mega Man development began. But as I thought about game design then, I started to wonder if designers had really thought deeply about enemy placement and behavior.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this before, Ariga, but in an action game or platformer, there’s often that one part in a stage where you always die, right? And quite often in those parts, it’s the way the enemies act that’s totally unfair and absurd, don’t you think?

Ariga: Ah… yeah! That’s true.

Kitamura: In fact, no matter what game, it’s those difficulty spikes that become the bottlenecks for players, and leave them with the impression that the game was too hard. And yet, at the same time, it’s a fact that those tough parts also comprise some of the core gameplay in any game.

Well, in order to sort it all out for myself, I decided to play a bunch of different games and study just those difficult sections, replaying them over and over. In the Rockman Tanjou Densetsu comic, where you mentioned my character being locked away playing games all day, I guessed that you were referring to that experience.

Also, two of my personal goals for Mega Man were to create a game where all the stages could be cleared in an hour, and to make something that players would want to come back to again and again. To that end, I actually calculated the total number of stages by measuring Mega Man’s walking speed and seeing how long it would take to get through each stage. I then split that up so that the first half of the game would be the robot master stages, and the second would be the Wily stages.