Iceman's 30 for 30: Thirty Games, Characters, and Moments for my 30th Birthday

The Moment: The Intro and Title Screen
Its the clear choice, and Im not nearly crazy enough to pretend otherwise. If its not one of the coolest intros ever in a video game, its damn sure the coolest one of its era.

The design of Mega Man games is such that they dont really lend themselves to moments in the way that Ill most often be speaking about them in this project. When the entire point of the game is that you have eight stages at your disposal that can be done in any order, you lose out on the ability to design in a traditional fashion where you slowly ramp up the stakes and difficulty as the player improves at the game. Even in the more micro sense of the levels themselves, players are mostly dealing with bite-sized, single-screen obstacle puzzles and then immediately moving on to the next one; theres never any breathing room for things to stick in your mind when youre constantly having to deal with the next thing. Sure, the Wily stages have their occasional heart-pounding sequences, and every once in a while youll have an individual obstacle like the aforementioned Quick Man lasers that stand out, but nothing in the gameplay ever leaves what Id call a lasting impression.

The Mega Man 2 title screen leaves a lasting impression. If the job of an intro is to build excitement for whats to come (and, well, it is), they dont come much better than this one. Its a perfect example of 8-Bit Mega Mans masterful ability to make the most of the technology and resources at its disposal, using little more than a few pixels worth of animation and a genius bit of musical wizardry to craft this quintessential piece of the mediums history.

Close your eyes and Im sure you can picture it pretty accurately even now. You can see that lovely, vast cityscape, lights all a-twinkling, with a few lines of text telling you all you need to know about the games plot in less than thirty seconds. And then you can see the viewpoint slowly panning up the building in the foreground. The music, which youll recognize as a throwback if youve beaten the original game, gradually quickens. Finally, at the top, we find our hero, hair blowing in the wind, gazing out at the place hes ready to once again fight to protect. The beat drops and the music goes wild. Youre humming it right now in your head, I bet. Maybe you take a few more seconds to appreciate it before you actually hit Start to choose your difficulty. But once you do, the killer tunes abruptly stop. The helmet comes on. Get hyped. Get ready. Its time to get to work.