Development
Mega Man 6 was developed at the same time as the franchise's first spin-off, Mega Man X for Nintendo's newer console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Series artist Keiji Inafune stated that having a video game franchise with six titles is very rare, and one of the advantages to this is that players expect certain aspects of each game to be repeated in the next. After having implemented so many different mechanics to the gameplay of past entries, Inafune thought that Rush adaptor assembly was inevitable. The artist struggled with the adaptor designs and ultimately found them to be unrealistic. According to Inafune, "If you think about it, they shouldn't be able to combine like this. It would be awkward if parts of Rush like his neck were left over after they combined, so what was I supposed to do?"
The Robot Masters featured in some of the previous Mega Man games were the result of design contests held in Japan, in which fans of the series would submit their character ideas to Capcom. Keeping with the tradition, Japan held a design contest for Mega Man 6. After the release of Mega Man 5, the magazine Nintendo Power held a similar contest in North America. Only eight out of the more than 200,000 worldwide character submissions for Mega Man 6 were accepted for the game. Six of the Robot Masters were designed by Japanese fans, while the remaining two (Knight Man and Wind Man) were designed by North American fans who entered the Nintendo Power contest. Inafune admitted that it was stressful when the last characters being designed for the game were not meeting with the development team's schedule. He concluded, "For having hit a lot of roadblocks, I feel like we got a lot done for 6. The theme for our designs was 'The world is our stage,' and I really enjoyed bringing what I felt was the unique flavor of different countries into the game." Yuko Takehara composed the musical score for Mega Man 6. Takehara collaborated with several other composers for the follow-up Mega Man 7 in 1995.
Mega Man 6 is the last title in the franchise to be released on the 8-bit NES. A few months after the publication of Mega Man 5, Capcom announced the sixth installment in the original series, as well as Mega Man Soccer and Mega Man X for the SNES. Capcom chose not to publish the game outside Japan. Instead, Nintendo of America published it in March 1994. Such a late release on the aging NES ensured its relative commercial obscurity among concurrent releases. Before the NES era in North America was about to end, Nintendo of America made a plan to help sell it along with Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II and the NES version of Wario's Woods, which were also published by Nintendo in North America during the same time. Their plan was to release the top-loading NES-101 for a retail price of $49.99 to attract consumers to buying the updated version of the original NES along with one or more new titles for the console, including Mega Man 6. The game was also showcased alongside Mega Man X at the 1994 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Mega Man 6 was re-released for the PlayStation in 1999 as part of the Rockman Complete Works series exclusive to Japan. This version of the game features a number of extras including remixed music, artwork galleries, and a "navi mode" to help guide players. A port of the Complete Works edition was released on the North American-exclusive Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube in 2004 and Xbox in 2005. Mega Man 6 was released on Japanese mobile phones via the i-mode service in 2007.
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