Analysis of a Pre 1990 Game: Mega Man
Mega Man is a game that has always been near to my heart. Although I never owned a NES I remember spending countless hours as a kid trying to find working emulators and roms for my Windows 95 PC. The original Mega Man was released in 1987 and was the first in a long line of Mega Man games to come.
Upon starting the game up the player is greeted with a myriad of intro music, and menu bleeps. When a stage is selected and loaded up new music plays. Every song for each level is different and fits the theme of the level. The music for the Electric Man stage, features techo-esque drums and a fast paced melody. The Fireman level music is very fast paced and features a driving rhythm from the bassline and percussion. Each song is easily recognizable and they're all pretty catchy, I remember playing back through levels just to listen to the different themes as a kid.
Music aside this game has a ton of sound effects, and they're all played overlapping the music. The NES was able to support 5 audio channels at once, and I believe Mega Man made use of almost all of them. The layering of sound in this game is really nice. For example you can simultaneously hear level music, weapon sounds, explosions and jumping bleeps.
To talk about the sheer amount of sounds in the game, the amount of sounds for your arm cannon alone is ridiculous for a game from this era. A key component of the Mega Man franchise is collecting the powers of the bosses you've slain. Killing Cutman for example gives you the ability to switch your cannon to Cutmode, which changes the projectile behavior, speed and most importantly for this sound effect. Each of the 8 weapons in the original Mega Man act and sound differently, which was always a huge draw for me. I loved that you could play each level differently, and that sometimes switching weapon on the fly was the best way to get through a stage. With that and all the different sounds for different enemies and bosses I feel like Mega Man was definitely a huge step forward in for sound in games.
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