Rockman Xover

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. Inafune recalled that the Mega Man development team worked extremely hard to complete the final product, with a project supervisor and lead designer who sought perfection in every possible aspect of the game.

The development team for Mega Man consisted of only six people. Inafune (credited as "Inafking") designed and illustrated nearly all of the game's characters and enemies, and the Japanese Rockman logo, box art, and instruction manual. He was responsible for rendering these designs into graphical sprite form. He said, "We didn't have [a lot of] people, so after drawing character designs, I was actually doing the dotting (pixelation) for the Nintendo.

According to GamesRadar, the Mega Man games were the first to feature a non-linear "level select" option. This was a stark contrast to both linear games (like Super Mario Bros.) and open world games (like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid). GamesRadar credits the "level select" feature of Mega Man as the basis for the non-linear mission structure found in most open-world, multi-mission, sidequest-heavy games, including modern games like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.

The original Mega Man series was well received, with IGN ranking all six original titles in the top 100 best NES games. Mega Man 2 in particular is widely regarded as the best of the series and one of the finest and most influential platformers of all time. IGN ranked it as the fourth best NES game, behind only Super Mario and Legend of Zelda titles, calling it "virtually flawless" and its gameplay "oft-replicated and never exceeded".