Amazon’s upcoming Prime Video series “Secret Level“ promises a unique anthology with each episode focusing on a different video game world. “Armored Core,” “Sifu,” various PlayStation franchises all in one, and “The Outer Worlds” are just some of the franchises getting episodes. Also on that list is one of the older franchises in gaming, “Mega Man.”
Being all of twenty seconds long, we don’t get to see a lot of Mega Man, but we do get to see some of where the episode is going with the characterization and backstory. The only dialogue we get is from Mega Man’s creator, Dr. Light. He addresses the heroic robot by his original name, Rock and tells him, “It doesn’t matter what I made you for. This is what you are meant for.” Light is basically summing up the “Mega Man” back story. Light is an inventor who created two lab assistant robots named Rock and Roll. He would continue to make other robots only for them to be corrupted and reprogrammed by former associate, Dr. Wily. Knowing that something needs to be done, Rock offers to be refitted into a combat robot and takes on the name Mega Man. Or Rockman in the original Japanese.
So good old Dr. Light is trying to give Mega Man a pep talk, interspersed with what looks like a confrontation with Bomb Man. The shape of the larger robot’s head fits with the profile of the explosive wielding boss, plus he’s throwing orb like explosives at Megs, so it seems like this is our introduction to one of the original six robot masters. The first game included Bomb Man, Guts Man, Cut Man, Ice Man, Elec Man, and Fire Man. This is a BIG Bomb Man though. In other media, namely the Ruby-Spears cartoon and Archie Comic series, he was around the same size is the titular hero. Clearly some liberties have been taken with the source material to dramatic effect.
There have been a number of animated “Mega Man” adaptations besides this and the aforementioned Ruby-Spears series from 1994. Then again, there’s also been a number of “Mega Man” video game spin-offs too. This is why there were series like “MegaMan NT Warrior” and “Mega Man Star Force” to go along with their respective game franchises. The original version of the Blue Bomber got a kind of related series in 2018 with “Mega Man: Fully Charged” but it was not anything to write home about. Unless you like writing home about bad things.
This upcoming episode of “Secret Level” has the potential to do more for Mega Man than creator and publisher Capcom has done in the last several years. The last true game in the franchise was “Mega Man 11” back in 2018. Aside from compilation re-releases and cameos in other projects, there hasn’t been a lot of love for the gaming icon. He deserves better and we can only hope this will be a step towards reminding people why Mega Man is one of the greatest characters in the history of video games.
“Secret Level” premiers December 10th on Prime Video.
