Mega Man 4 - Development

Development

Mega Man series artist Keiji Inafune stated that the development team had very few problems while working on Mega Man 4. Inafune designed Dr. Cossack and Kalinka as two new storyline characters for the game. Cossack, who was originally named "Dr. Vice", was made much younger than Dr. Light and Dr. Wily. Inafune also considered giving him American traits, but decided upon influences from Russia instead. Kalinka was created because so many male characters already existed in the series at this point. However, Inafune did not intend for players to compare her to Mega Man's sister Roll. The idea for Eddie originally came about during the development of Mega Man 2. Eddie was designed as a supporting character that "would behave like a lottery", either pleasantly surprising or disappointing the player with the item he gives Mega Man.

Mega Man 4 was the first game in the series for Hayato Kaji, a prominent designer for many later Mega Man games. Kaji was responsible for the chargeable Mega Buster, a gameplay mechanic that would become a staple of the series. "We knew adding a two-level or three-level charge would change the whole flavor of the game in some respects, and we were very mindful of that," Inafune explained. The Robot Masters in Mega Man 4 are a result of a design contest for fans held in Japan. With over 70,000 character submissions, the development team spent an extended period of time narrowing them down to only eight bosses. According to Kaji, the team was very satisfied with many of the chosen designs and almost no changes were made to their original illustrations. They were so impressed with Skull Man that they scrapped an entire level being created just so they could restart it and devote it to that Robot Master. The winning eight contestants of the design contest were each issued a special "golden cartridge" edition of Mega Man 4. As there are only eight of these cartridges in existence, they are extremely rare and fetch a large collector's price today. The musical score for Mega Man 4 was composed by Minae Fujii, while the sound programming and sound effects were handled by Yasuaki Fujita, who had composed the soundtrack for Mega Man 3 the previous year.