Mega Man 2 - Development

Development

See also: Development of the first Mega Man game

So we, of our own accord, got together, spent our own time, we worked really, really hard, you know, just 20-hour days to complete this, because we were making something we wanted to make. Probably in all my years of actually being in a video game company, that was the best time of my working at Capcom, because we were actually working toward a goal, we were laying it all on the line, we were doing what we wanted to do. And it really showed in the game, because it’s a game, once again, that we put all our time and effort and love, so to speak, into it, designing it.

“ ” Keiji Inafune, April 2004

Mega Man 2 was developed and published by Capcom. In retrospect, series producer Keiji Inafune described the game's development as a "rogue effort". The first Mega Man game—released in 1987—was not successful enough to justify the immediate development of a sequel. Capcom allowed the development team to create a sequel on the condition that they work concurrently on other projects as well. The staff spent their own time on the project to improve upon the original by adding more levels and weapons, as well as improving the graphics. The project supervisor of the first Mega Man invited Inafune to the sequel's development crew; Inafune was working on a separate game at the time. In the previous title, Inafune worked as an artist and character designer, but became more involved in the production process of the sequel. "Working on marked my second year at this, and I even got to mentor a 'new kid', which opened up a whole new world of stress for me," Inafune recounted. The development time for the game was only three to four months.

Due to the limited amount of cartridge space available for the first game, content was omitted from the final product. The unused elements were later transferred to Mega Man 2. The team was limited by the graphical capabilities of the console, and designed characters as pixel art to maintain consistency between the designs and final product; some design elements, however, were lost in the transition. The gameplay system from the original game was kept for Mega Man 2, but the team included more traps for the player to navigate. The game's three support items were added to aid the player because of complaints from consumers and Capcom's marketing department regarding the original game's high difficulty. Inafune's supervisor was "especially unsure" about the usefulness of the Energy Tanks. The developers allowed input from the public by including boss designs created by fans. Capcom received 8,370 boss submissions for the game, although even the designs for the final eight Robot Masters were "tweaked". Inafune intended his artwork for Mega Man 2 to be more "anime-ish" than in the first game. A second difficulty setting was added for the North American release. The original version was labeled "difficult", and a "normal" setting was created that made the enemies weaker.

The soundtrack for Mega Man 2 was composed mainly by Takashi Tateishi, credited as Ogeretsu Kun (a nickname implying rudeness, geretsu (下劣) meaning rudeness or depraved in Japanese). Ippo Yamada, sound designer for Mega Man 7, explained that even in 1995 "Capcom... was just beginning to transition from crediting staff members by aliases to their full names." Manami Matsumae, who had composed the music for the first Mega Man, also made some contributions to the soundtrack of this game, in particular the title screen overture (which she had previously written for the first game's ending) and the music for Air Man's level. As with the previous game, the sound programming was handled by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi.