Megaman 1 was indeed quite difficult, partially due to some sections of it that were particularly bullshit. Luckily it’s also riddled with bugs, many of which can be abused to the player’s benefit, although back in those days we did not have the internet to enlighten us as to all of them.

I figured out the pause glitch all by myself. I’m just special like that. I also got myself stuck in various amusing and, alas, game-ending ways by stuffing poor little Rockman into all types of walls by abusing the platforms with the magnet beam to see if I could find anything interesting. In addition to not having the charge ability on the mega buster, Rush, or a seventh and eighth robot master, the one thing everyone forgets Megaman 1 did not have was the password system. If you got wedged someplace and couldn’t get yourself zipped out of it or contrive of a way to have an enemy kill you, that’d be a reset. If you wanted to beat the game you had to do it in one sitting.

My first Megaman game was actually 4, followed by 3 on the recommendation of a friend, and then 1. It’s surprising how archaic Megaman 1 is if you’re not already familiar with it. It’s amazing how quickly Capcom nailed what would become the iconic Megaman formula and how consistent the games became, starting right at… Megaman 2. The first game feels like a Mandela effect fever dream, certainly something that came from some parallel universe and was not, in any way, any of the games we actually got. Except it was.

Basically all of Elec Man’s stage has you climbing up a ladder. The pre-boss corridors are entire obstacle courses, not just the transitional anterooms we became used to. Rolling cutter kills Elec Man in just three hits, and somehow he also has two other weaknesses. Mettools don’t pop up but instead shoot at you by just lazily tilting their helmets to the side. You drop in to Bomb Man’s room from the top. The health and weapon energy pickups look nothing like in any subsequent game. The robot masters don’t have spaces in their names yet. And so on, and so forth.