This weekend retranauts, if you can't lick a limb, join them.

For the most part, people tend to associate the Mega Man series with KG Inafune.

After all, he worked with a series from the start to effective finish, providing art

for the original NES game and then shepherding the Latter Day games through Dick and Thin.

Inafune, the company killed all its in development Mega Man projects.

It's not for nothing that the two have become essentially synonymous.

Despite Inafune's key role in the series, it's not like Mega Man's spring fully formed

from his brain on day one.

On the contrary, Inafune's original task with Mega Man was to a large degree that of

an interpretive illustrator, rendering other people's pixel art sprites as cartoon characters

for posters, ads, manuals, and cover art.

The original Mega Man game was overseen by ghosts and goblins creator Tokuro Fujiwara,

whose penchant for cruel design dressed up in cartoon whimsy certainly made itself manifest

in Capcom's first original NES creation.

While Mega Man didn't pull any total dick moves along the lines of ghosting goblins'

mandatory run through a harder second loop of the adventure in order to see the ending,

it also didn't pull any punches.

The deadly floating platforms and ice man's stage, the unforgiving yellow devil, the relentless

boss gauntlet at the end of Dr. Wiley's stage, all of this added up to put Mega Man in

that rare and storied category of notoriously challenging NES game that managed to be

mostly fair about it.

And yet, they credit for Mega Man's delicate balance of brutality and the ability, doesn't

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