Game:

Mega Man (1987)

Duration: 0:00

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14

All audio/visual elements copyright Capcom, 1987. Music composed by Manami Matsumae.

The player performance in this gameplay was produced by the NESguide archive: an independent project, not affiliated with Nintendo or any other game company.

The original goal of this archive (completed in 2009) was to produce reference-worthy gameplays for the entire NES catalog. Now that it's 2025, I'm trying to update the catalog with new 4K captures using FPGA hardware (to faithfully recreate the og) and upscaling (to make it 4K).


NESGUIDE PLAYER NOTE (P1: Crow)

I asked my mom for a copy of Mike Tyson's Punch Out for my birthday mid-1988. She game home with this game that I had never heard of. The box art was deeply concerning. I was distraught. She said some guy at the store told her it was a good game. No Punch-Out!? Some guy? Little did I know that this random game department employee had just altered the course of my NES life.

I fell in love with this game almost immediately. It was non-linear. When you defeated a boss, you acquired its weapon. Using certain weapons on certain bosses made things easier; use Gutsman's weapon to smash Cutman's blades, use Cutman's weapon to cut Elecman's wires. use Elecman's weapon to electrify the water in Iceman. Logical, amazing... and yes, demanding.

It required a lot of practice and pattern memorization to get through the game, and I spent at least the entirety of the summer of 1988 working on it. Mega Man 1 still stands as my favorite game in the original series. Although I also remember when Mega Man 2 came out, how excited I was for it's release, and how hard it was to find it in a rental store without intercepting it at the return counter... the original Mega Man has a special place in my heart; the sheer dumb luck in how IT found ME.

This capture started as a no-death attempt and went fine for most of the way, but things fell apart at the clone. There was a particularly hairy situation with the Yellow Devil (big orange guy) that I barely survived, but overall... as always, it was a blast to play through this game again.


ABOUT MEGA MAN

Mega Man has been in several series and this is the first game in what is called the Mega Man Classic series. This first game established many of the conventions that would define several Mega Man series. Most notably, Mega Man established the setup of a number of stages, each with a Robot Master at the end that, when defeated, would pass on its unique power to Mega Man. Mega Man is made up of six stages, with a Robot Master at the end guarding a weapon. The stage select screen allows the player to choose from these six stages, and when they are all completed, the seventh and last stage appears in middle of the menu, replacing the text "Stage Select, Press Start". This last stage is in fact more like four regular stages linked together, some a bit shorter than average, but with very hard bosses.

Known on Famicom as: Rockman

NES Relatives:
   • Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1989) - NES Gameplay  
   • Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990) - NES Gameplay  
   • Mega Man 4 (Capcom, 1992) - NES Gameplay  
   • Mega Man 5 (Capcom, 1992) - NES Gameplay  
   • Mega Man 6 (Nintendo, 1994) - NES Gam...  


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