Timeline | 1987: Mega Man

Mega Man didn't do so well initially in North America thanks in part to this weird artwork!

Mega Man was an action-platforming game for the NES (much like many of the popular games of the time) but differentiated it that it had multiple levels with distinct bosses that the player could take on in any order - this freedom of advancement was quite the novelty at the time and along with the pretty good graphics and difficult but rewarding gameplay made Mega Man a great game. It would go on to start one of Capcom's most successful franchises (with 6 Mega Man games on the NES alone). Later Mega Man 2 and 3 especially would be more financial successes for Capcom (and Mega Man 2 is widly regarded as the best of the original series) but the Original Mega Man set the stage for all those that would come before it.

A screenshot of Mega Man's Cut Man stage.

Mega Man was vibrant and fun to play, it had great graphics for the time, awesome music, great replayability and awesome boss battles (although they are hard!). Mega Man was released (in both Japan and North America) in December 1987. While the game did better in sales than Capcom had expected (especially in Japan) it lagged behind what it's creator thought it should have done, especially in the United States - he blamed the inaccurate box art of the North American version for this.

The European box art is much cooler I think.

After the 6 NES Mega Man Games, Capcom revamped the series with Mega Man X (the start of a new sub-series) on the SNES which they continued with X2 and X3 (although they also did Mega Man 7 on SNES as well). Later they would take the series to the PS1, N64, PS2, and handhelds (in the form of Battle Network games). More recently Mega Man received two neo-retro games for downloadable services (PSN, XBLA, eShop, etc.) called Mega Man 9 and 10 (8 was on the PS1) that returned to the NES style.

Today Capcom mainly uses Mega Man as a guest start (games like Project X Zone, anything Capcom vs., etc.) with his biggest appearance being alongside PacMan and Sonic as guest stars in the newest Super Smash Bros. (for 3DS and Wii U)

Further Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Man_(video_game)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Man