Development
Mega Man X was developed by a team at Capcom which had worked on the long-running Mega Man series for the NES. Lead artist Keiji Inafune recounted that the development of Mega Man X required a lot of brainstorming for its storyline and content where the team's goal was to branch out from original Mega Man games while still maintaining their fundamentals. In the original Mega Man series, Inafune typically designed the protagonist while his protégé Hayato Kaji handled the supporting characters. However, their roles were reversed for Mega Man X. Kaji illustrated the protagonist X, but had a difficult time with the initial design. He was presented with much more freedom than he was accustomed with the SNES's larger palette of colors when compared to the NES. Inafune and Kaji worked simultaneously on the various designs for X with different pieces of armor attached. The idea for the armor parts came about because the game was planned during a time when role-playing video games were becoming extremely popular. Inafune felt that Mega Man had always represented a classic action game formula in which the hero earns his defeated enemies' abilities; the armor parts were added to supplement this concept.
Inafune created the character Zero, whom he originally intended to be the game's main, playable protagonist. "When the X series came out, I really wanted to redesign Mega Man," Inafune explained. "I 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." Fearing a negative reaction from fans, Zero was ultimately reduced to a role secondary to Mega Man X. The development team additionally wanted the world of Mega Man X to be much more sophisticated than in the first Mega Man series. They wanted to accomplish this with Zero's "hardcore" personality and the game's antagonist Sigma. As stated by Inafune, the original series' villain Dr. Wily had "a side to him you couldn't really hate". Sigma, however, was written as a once-good character suffering an "unforeseen error" that leads him to be completely evil. Mega Man X altered the franchise tradition of having themed boss characters with a "Man" moniker by replacing them with anthropomorphic, cyborg animals. The art and pixelization for these eight bosses were divided among three illustrators: Inafune did Storm Eagle and Chill Penguin; Kaji did Spark Mandrill, Launch Octopus, and Sting Chameleon; and Ikki Tazaki did Flame Mammoth, Armored Armadillo, and Boomer Kuwanger. The team was careful in making the bosses distinct from one another in both stature and coloring. Tatsuya Yoshikawa, a fourth artist who had recently been hired by Capcom, was given the task of assisting the rest of the team by designing, illustrating, and creating the sprites for the game's minor enemies. The musical score for Mega Man X was composed by Capcom's Alph Lyla group. The Japanese division of Sony Records published an arranged album featuring ten songs on March 9, 1994. Music using the SNES instrumentals was included as part of the Capcom Music Generation: Rockman X1 ~ X6 soundtrack released by Suleputer in 2003.
The success of the Mega Man series allowed Capcom to continue releasing NES titles well into the 16-bit era. A teaser for an SNES incarnation of the Mega Man series first made its way into a preview of Mega Man 6 in the spring 1993 issue of the Japanese Club Capcom fan magazine. Mega Man X was announced in North America in a March 1993 Game Players magazine interview with Capcom's Senior Vice President Joseph Morici. The tentatively titled "Super Mega Man" was originally to have a "fairly large memory configuration and a battery backup". The autumn 1993 issue of Club Capcom announced Rockman X for a December 1993 release in Japan, divulged several plot and gameplay details, and showed Zero as a silhouetted "Blues-like character". Leading up to its release, the game was covered by the North American press surrounding the summer 1993 and winter 1994 Consumer Electronics Shows.
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