If you grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System in the 90s, you surely remember Mega Man, a series of incredibly difficult action platformers starring a cute blue robot of the same name. The original Mega Men debuted on NES back in 1987 and received five more sequels before making a jump to SNES in 1995. It’s been more than six years since the last Mega Man game hit the market and while it remains to be seen whether Capcom will ever decide to make another one, the Japanese company is at least willing to re-release the original series on modern devices. Namely, Capcom just announced that the entire collection of NES Mega Man games will be hitting the Google Play Store in early 2017.
The six Mega Man games in question will be released in Japan on January 6th, though it remains to be seen whether Capcom will bring them to the West. However, given the global popularity of this franchise, it seems likely we’ll be playing all 8-bit Mega Man games on our Android devices sooner rather than later. Capcom will release the games in Japan under the title Rockman, which is the name that the franchise used in the Far Eastern markets. While the Western games were always just titled numerically, the Rockman versions were a bit more creative with their titles. More specifically, the NES series consists of Rockman, Rockman 2: The Enigma of Dr. Wily, Rockman 3: The End of Dr. Wily, Rockman 4: A New Ambition, Rockman 5: Blues’ Trap, and Rockman 6: The Greatest Battle in History.
The first revealed screenshot of the Android port of Mega Man suggests that this mobile re-release will stick to the original 4:3 aspect ratio and use the extra space on the screen for virtual controls. There’s still no word on how Capcom will price these games, though it seems likely that the company will opt for a one-time fee with no additional in-app purchases. So, if you’re on the lookout for a retro sidescroller that will push your reflexes to their very limit, it’s possible you’ll soon have not one, but six of them to play through. In any case, more information is expected to follow soon.