Mega Man
video game franchise
Mega Man (known as Rockman in Japan) is a video game franchise developed and published by Capcom, featuring the eponymous protagonist. The original game was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, and spawned a franchise that expanded to over 50 games on multiple systems. As of July 2026, the series had sold a total of 45 million units worldwide.
Mega Man has been popular among gamers and has been reimagined and evolved as a video game character for over 30 years.
The main series, dubbed the "Classic" series, consists of eleven games, the stand-alone Mega Man & Bass, the spin-off Game Boy series (released in Japan as Rockman World), and various ports, remakes, and compilations. The storyline of the "Classic" series is succeeded by the Mega Man X, Mega Man Zero, Mega Man ZX, and the Mega Man Legends series, all of which set in a single continuity. Two other series, the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force series, take place in an alternate universe where the internet flourished rather than robotics.
History
1987: conception and first game
Before Mega Man, Capcom primarily made arcade games, and its console releases were mostly ports of these games. In the mid-1980s, Capcom made plans to develop Mega Man specifically for the Japanese home console market. They decided to bring in fresh, young talent for the small team, including artist Keiji Inafune, a recent college graduate who started on the Street Fighter team.
“Mega Man” enters the record as video game franchise. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mega, video and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Mega Man” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mega, video and game provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7565689. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 2026.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mega Man” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.