When I was about eight years old I went through a massive Mega Man phase. For those that don’t know him, he’s this little guy:

Dance, lil’ guy!

In the 90s, Mega Man had an absolute slam dunk catalog of games — Beloved platformers, many of which are still viewed as classics to this day. I… did not play any of those. We didn’t have any video game consoles in my house growing up except for my beloved Gameboy. So instead, the entirety of my Mega Man knowledge game from Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge…

A largely forgotten (and for good reasons) entry in the Mega Man ouevre.

…and the 1994 Mega Man cartoon, which I owned on a pair of VHS tapes.

I haven’t seen this in years but I have reason to suspect it is probably not great!

How did I even come into possession of these tapes, if I knew nothing about Mega Man the video game character? Well, when I was eight I was obsessed with robots. It started with R2-D2 and C-3P0 in Star Wars and quickly grew out to anything featuring robots — Short Circuit, *batteries not included, Silent Runnings, and so I imagine I saw these tapes at a video store or Blockbuster, grabbed them… and the rest was history.

My son is almost 4 and so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how absolutely random it is what thing will grab a kid’s attention. From the adult perspective, this whims can seem completely transitory — Little hobbies or obsessions that last for a few days or weeks — but as a kid these phases feel like they encompass grand swaths of your life.

I remember scouring the early internet for websites about Mega Man to learn as many of the robot masters as I could — Learning to draw them, pixel by pixel, in my graph paper composition notebooks. I would design my own robot masters, and draw out elaborate stages for Mega Man to traverse. My son is going through something similar with Astro Bot right now; creating imaginary courses for his toys to run around and find their friends — just like Astro — jumping on “bounce things” and pulling out “spring things” and avoiding various and sundry monsters…

I feel lucky that I at least have the base knowledge of what he’s emulating to understand it and play along; how bewildering must Mega Man have been to my parents? Explaining my original character “Lightbulb Man” (spoiler: not that original) to my parents and showing off the stage I had designed for him to run through. They really knew nothing about video games and, as far as they knew, they were keeping me as isolated from video games as possible.

When I first transitioned into the video game industry as a career, my parents expressed some surprise and shock at the way things had gone, but in more recent years they said they’ve looked back and identified “the signs” in hindsight. My mom told me she found a whole stack of artwork and notebooks from my childhood where I was planning my own video games, copious drawings of various video game characters, and tells me that maybe she “should have always known.” I can’t help but wonder if all of my old Mega Man notebooks and drawings were in there.

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