Mega Man (Rockman) · Nintendo Famicom / NES · Build: early 1987 · Discovered: 2004 · Developer Archive
Capcom's original Rockman was shaped by director Akira Kitamura's small team, which considered names such as Rainbow Man before settling on Rockman — and the finished game lacked features, like passwords, that the series later made standard.
Rockman (Mega Man) was developed by a small team at Capcom and released in Japan in December 1987. Akira Kitamura directed the game and designed the hero, first as a pixel sprite; Keiji Inafune, then a young artist, worked on enemy designs and the character illustrations. Inafune has said that calling him the creator of Mega Man overstates his role. Names considered for the hero included Mighty Kid, Knuckle Kid and Rainbow Man — the last a nod to the way he changes colour with each weapon — before Rockman was chosen. The finished game was a modest seller, and several features that later defined the series, such as passwords and the eight-boss structure, arrived with Mega Man 2.
Kitamura's team built the game around a hero who copied the weapons of the bosses he defeated, with each Robot Master weak to another's weapon. Players could choose the order in which they tackled the six stages, which made working out the chain of weaknesses part of the challenge.
For years Keiji Inafune was widely described as Mega Man's creator. Inafune himself has played that down, describing his work on the first game as design and illustration under director Akira Kitamura, with Tokuro Fujiwara as a senior figure on the project. Inafune became increasingly central to the series in later years, but the original game was the work of a small, collaborative team.