Mega Man creator Akira Kitamura has a new Patreon entry that looks back at the untold planning stages of Mega Man 1, when the schedule was set for developing a game for the Famicom Disk System. At the start, the “team” was only two people: Kitamura himself and background artist F (YASUKICHI), and the post gives a really cool sense of how small and uncertain everything still was at that point.
A major turning point comes when programmer Mr. M (H.M.D.) joins the project. Kitamura describes an early temporary player character Mr. M built that moved with Mario Bros.-like inertia, resulting in movement that was incredibly smooth, fluid, and already polished enough to swap in immediately. The problem, Kitamura explains, is that Mega Man wasn’t meant to control like a momentum-heavy platformer. Because the game’s design demanded tighter, more precise input for aiming and shooting, the team had to wrestle with whether that inertia was a feature worth keeping at all.
Later, the team expands again when two new designers arrive: Keiji Inafune (INA/INAFKING) and TOM PON. Kitamura touches on how they began standardizing the workflow, essentially creating “rules” for how character and background designs should be built under 8-bit limitations, to keep everything consistent as more hands joined the project.
If you’d like to read the full story with all of Kitamura’s details and firsthand commentary, please consider subscribing to his Patreon here! It's an invaluable source of Mega Man history!
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