Mega Man X
Capcom's 1993 reboot of Mega Man for the Super NES: a new hero, X, a century after the NES games, with a dash, a wall-jump, armor upgrades hidden in Dr. Light's capsules, and Sigma, a villain who used to be one of the good guys. Some players reportedly thought the X was the Roman numeral 10.
Mega Man began on the NES, and for the Super Nintendo, Capcom's team wanted to reinvent him while keeping the basics. Lead artist Keiji Inafune said he wanted "a totally different Mega Man. I'm a designer, a creator; I wanted something new. I didn't want to use the same old Mega Man." His first choice for the hero was his own new character, Zero, but fearing a fan backlash, the team made Zero the partner instead, and Inafune's protégé Hayato Kaji illustrated the new lead, X. The bosses dropped the old "Man" names for animal-like robots (Chill Penguin, Spark Mandrill, Storm Eagle), and the villain changed too. The original series' Dr. Wily had "a side to him you couldn't really hate," Inafune said. Sigma was written as a once-good robot with an "unforeseen error" that made him completely evil.
The story is set in the 22nd century, about 100 years after the original games. X, Dr. Light's final creation, was sealed away to run a 30-year diagnostic, but Light died before it finished and X stayed buried for a century. The scientist who finds him copies his design into "Reploids," thinking robots, and when some go rogue as "Mavericks," a police force called the Maverick Hunters is formed to stop them. Its leader, Sigma, goes Maverick himself. You still pick eight stages in any order and take each boss's weapon. What was new was movement: X can climb, slide down and jump off nearly any wall, and hidden capsules show a hologram of Dr. Light and upgrade his legs (adding a dash), armor or helmet. A secret capsule even gives him Street Fighter's Hadouken.
The game came out in Japan as Rockman X on December 17, 1993, and in North America in January 1994. GamesRadar later called it "a total reinvention of the series." It sold 1.165 million copies worldwide by 2001, and Mega Man X2 followed in 1994. Zero proved so popular that he got his own series, Mega Man Zero, in 2002. The original was later included on Nintendo's Super NES Classic Edition in 2017.
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