Permission to Play: The Summer of Mega Man
I’ve forgotten how to play. Is this a result of over-optimizing on “paying the bills” and under-optimizing on passion? I believe that the sentence that just popped out of my head might give some insight.
NES and the Elementary Years
I tried playing Mega Man sometime last year to bring back some long forgotten joy from my past. Guess what? It’s fucking brutal. I don’t know how I ever played it, much less beat it.
While I may hang up my dreams of being a Mega Man speedrunner forever (that was never one of my dreams), it triggered an odd memory from my elementary school years. Way back before Gamefaqs, before IGN, and certainly before “day 1 patches,” the primary source of information about games was what your friends were playing.
One Spring we played the hell out of Mega Man. Recess was the time my group of about four friends opted to walk the yard instead of participating in the organized kickball that the cool kids loved so much. We would each take our turn unfolding a piece of paper that was haphazardly torn from our composition book to show the others. On the paper would be a crudely drawn (in my case, at least) Mega Man boss of our own design.
We discussed the progress in the game, but were more eager to talk about what Capcom should create for the next Mega Man. Mega Man had bosses, all cleverly named for their power, ripe to steal after you beat them. Cut Man had scissors, Ice Man had ice, Fire Man inexplicably had fire. We thought our creations were much better. Snake Man wielded two venomous snakes for arms. Pogo Man jumped around on a pogo stick that had a retractible blade ready to impale Mega Man from above. Toxic Man vomited toxic waste on Mega Man to melt him into oblivion.
We spent hours detailing the powers, creating intricate back stories for their creation, and drawing them to the best of our ability. The walk around the yard was showcase time, where we would pick the best. At the end of that Summer, the envelope would be sealed and addressed to Nintendo Power with the explicit instructions to forward our ideas on to Capcom, hoping that we would see some of our creations in subsequent Mega man games.
Mega Man 2 and 3 came and went without a hint of our creations to be found. We still enjoyed the games, but none of them sparked the creative fervor that the original Mega Man did that Spring and Summer. I don’t know if we lost interest or if the games lost their sense of surprise. Maybe it was a little of both.
Relearning to Play
Embarking on a new writing journey brings memories like this in flashes and dreams.. My day job is every analytical and data driven. So I use vocabulary like over-optimize for work. This is very much anti-play vernacular.
I am trying to recapture the naivety of my 10-year-old self, who sent a homemade portfolio of Mega Man boss concepts to Nintendo Power hoping to be noticed by Capcom. The paradox is that the first thing that occurs to me now is to “research” how to capture that feeling when that is the exact opposite of what it likely takes to achieve that goal.
Note to self: daydream more about kickass Mega Man bosses.
