It All Comes Back to Mega Man (By SNES Master KI)

Everyone has their own story of their development as a gamer. The systems and games you played as a small child will always have a special nostalgia for you that can’t be recreated. There are some games even among those that stand out, games that expanded your horizons or made you realize just how great gaming could be. Having an accelerated nostalgia gland (I had early 90s nostalgia in 1994), I have tons of games that do this for me, but for this tribute I’m going to focus on one series (you know, the one in the title of the article) that was there for several of my defining moments as a gamer.

It all started in 1992. I was five (or possibly six) years old and had already been instinctively drawn to gaming for a couple years. Unfortunately, my parents wouldn’t buy me a game system and I was forced to subsist on a couple of quarters per visit to somewhere with arcade machines and a few Tiger handhelds (I recently visited the toy section of a local store to see if they still sold those things. They sold similar technology games, but they were all sports or gambling. Back in the day we had ones based on game franchises dammit!). Then in what had to be one of the first passing downs of a personal computer in history, my family got my grandfather’s computer. It was a Tandy 1000, and was woefully outdated even in 1992, but I didn’t care, I had something that could play actual games!

Well, playing actual games may have been an overstatement. Finding computer games that would run on it was an ordeal. You’ve probably never played Flinstones: Dino Lost in Bedrock or the DOS Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, but I can give you a strong indication of their quality, as well as my other Tandy games, with one sentence:

Mega Man and Mega Man III DOS were the best Tandy games I had.

Yes, that’s how I was introduced to Mega Man, with his DOS games. My computer couldn’t even run them in full color, Mega Man was made light blue and forced to exist in a mostly pink world. But I didn’t care, if it was the only thing I could play, I was going to play it! In a testament to what pure determination and a lack of options can do to you, I managed to regularly beat both of the MMDOS games at age 6. I knew these weren’t good games compared to what I played in arcades or saw on consoles, but I was determined to play, and I came to love the Mega Man series.

Since you have an idea of my gaming condition from the very early 90s, I’m sure you can imagine just how much I loved visiting my cousin with his SNES and dozens of games. Sadly, he lived in another state and I only saw him a couple of times a year. That just made the rare occasions I got to plunge into his seemingly endless game collection all the more sweet. In early 1994, I had arrived at his house and was trying to control my excitement enough to choose which game to play first, when I saw it:

Mega.
Man.
X.

I was used to and had come to almost love the DOS Mega Man games, so I think you’ll understand why I can’t find words to describe just how incredible it was when I first played a real Mega Man game. And not just any, to this day MMX remains as my favorite Mega Man game of any series and one of my top 10 favorite games of all time.

Just the thrill of seeing what was my favorite gaming character in such a fantastic game, made exponentially more significant by contrast, would be enough to make this a defining moment for me as a gamer. But there’s more to Mega Man X. In 1993 I finally got a console. For reasons I really don’t remember, I chose Genesis over SNES. Since $100 (can you believe there was a time when systems were $100 after just two years?) seemed as hard to earn for my 7 year old self as one billion dollars does to me now, I naturally became determined to believe my system was the absolute best and there was nothing on that other system worth playing. The other system being SNES, that wasn’t easy to do, but I managed. Until I played Mega Man X. That just wasn’t resistible. I was forced to admit that my one system wasn’t the be all end all of gaming.

About a year after I played MMX, a friend of my parents’ sold us her SNES. The first three games I bought for it (and this was over the span of 9 months) were Mega Man X, Mega Man X2, and Mega Man 7. In addition to the bliss of finally owning MMX, there were game rentals to let me see just how great SNES was. Unfortunately, instead of understanding that there are lots of systems with good games on them, I simply transferred my complete loyalty to Nintendo. Not the ideal position, but I was happy. After all, it was freaking SNES, if you’re going to be devoted to one console, that’s the one.

But time doesn’t stand still, and game companies don’t remain dominant forever. The first console generation shift where I owned older consoles occurred, and I didn’t want to believe SNES would stop making games. I eventually realized I couldn’t stop the changing of the guard, and I managed to open my heart up to N64, carrying my Nintendo loyalty across generations. But things weren’t the same. As I mention whenever I see someone complain about “droughts” on Wii, I lived through the legendary N64 game droughts in the worst position. It wasn’t easy convincing myself that I didn’t want any of those Playstation 1 games I saw in magazines, or that N64 had such a full lineup I never thought about wanting another system. Thankfully I had my SNES to keep me sane (Good systems don’t die, they retire. And their games plummet in price.). Since I was still pretty new to gaming (I hadn’t played any Metal Gear, Castlevania, or Final Fantasy games, so Nintendo losing them wasn’t a big deal) and wasn’t allowed to play M rated games, I was able to minimize my longing for a PS1 fairly well. But there was one franchise I was attached to that made the switch, and I’m sure you can guess what it was.

Mega Man X4. The franchise that had given me my Nintendo loyalty had left, and I had a hole in my gaming heart. I held out longer than I possibly could have today if a game I wanted that badly was beyond my reach, two years had passed since MMX4 and it was the fall of 1999. In a full circle of events I’m only realizing the incredible irony of as I type this, my only hope for playing MMX4 without violating my loyalty to Nintendo was the PC (If there’s one things fanboys will absolutely not deprive themselves of for the sake of system loyalty, it’s the internet) port. However, I hadn’t learned about buying old games online yet, so finding a fairly obscure game from a few years ago was not easy. After thinking I had finally found it on Capcom’s site and then having my hopes crushed, I realized I had no choice. I had to get a Playstation.

As soon as I thought those words, I was free. I had one of those newspaper like price guides Funcoland used to hand out that listed pretty much every NA game for major systems, and I looked at the hundreds of games in the PS1 section, and realized I could buy them now. My loyalty to Nintendo was too developed to let me even consider switching to Sony exclusively (Since playing MMX, I had discovered the greatness of Mario and Zelda, the only series that I today rank ahead of Mega Man X), so I finally became a multi-console gamer in spirit. I was free to play anything I wanted, Nintendo and Sony could co-exist in peace on my coffee table. And the trigger of this epiphany was, of course, Mega Man.

So that’s my story of how Mega Man showed me the promise of gaming, introduced me to SNES, and cured me of my one company stubbornness. Those are far from my only good MM memories, but they’re the ones that most impacted my identity as a gamer. Until next time, please join me in hoping for a SNES style Mega Man X9 for Wiiware, because I’m pretty sure that would trigger the ability in me to make some wonderful invention that would greatly benefit mankind, at the very least. Fight Mega Man, fight! For everlasting peace!