Trivia / Mega Man 3

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• Dummied Out: Several unused graphics remain in the game's data, with some of the more noteworthy examples including:
  • A large Saturn-like planet intended for the beginning of Gemini Man's stage. Technically it is still used in the final game, but because of how the stage uses parallax scrolling, it can't be seen in normal gameplay.
  • Damaged and destroyed tiles among Magnet Man's tileset, suggesting at one point it would have had a Doc Robot variant.
  • A static effect found among Spark Man's graphics. They appear after his small spreadshot spark graphics, suggesting Mega Man was supposed to be frozen by them exactly as the Spark Shock weapon does to enemies.
  • An animation of Proto Man transforming into Break Man; in the final game, he abruptly appears in the form for a single boss fight without explanation. He also has unused sprites for shooting on the ground (in the final game, he only fires while jumping).
• Executive Meddling: In the very early stages of development, the game's designers gave serious consideration to scrapping the stage select and replacing it either with an entirely linear level structure, or something akin to the map system from the then-recent Super Mario Bros. 3. Capcom overruled them, though later games in the series would experiment with the level structure a little more.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: While the game is Keiji Inafune's least favorite entry from the Classic series — albeit not the one he considers the worst, with that title going to the Game Boy Mega Man II — a not-insignificant number of fans consider it to be the best game in the whole Mega Man franchise.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: One oft-repeated story about the game's production is that its original composer, Harumi Fujita had to drop out early on after she gave birth, and that she was replaced by her husband, Yasuaki Fujita. In actual fact, Yasuaki and Harumi are completely unrelated other than happening to share the same surname, and it's simply an incredible coincidence that they happened to end up working on the same title.
• Troubled Production: The lead planner behind Mega Man and Mega Man 2, Akira Kitamura, left Capcom while 3 was in the planning stages, forcing Capcom to assign talented programmer Masahiko Kurokawa (who had already made a name for himself on other Capcom projects, but hadn't worked on a Mega Man game before) to the team. According to this report, Kurokawa didn't mesh well with the new team (particularly Keiji Inafune) and abruptly left the project halfway through (he would, however, return as co-designer on Mega Man X and Mega Man 7). This lead to Inafune having to step up and pull together a completed game in a very short time — with his own lack of experience at being the lead designer of a game in turn forcing him to draft in DuckTales designer Yoshinori Takenaka for assistance — leading to a number of technical problems and cut content.
• What Could Have Been: Due to the game's rushed development schedule, many features were dropped:
  • According to Keiji Inafune, all eight stages were originally planned to be revisited for the Doc Robot portion of the game^note Snake Man would have housed Air Man, Top Man would have housed Wood Man, Magnet Man would have housed Quick Man, and portions of Hard Man's stage would have been flooded in order to accommodate Bubble Man, Break Man was supposed to be a totally unique boss (instead of being a reskinned Proto Man), and the Skull Fortress was supposed to be much more expansive (evidenced in the "map screen" transitions; this is the only game in the Classic series where the map and the actual level layouts don't match, with the map believed to show the intended stage layouts), among other things. All this wasted content is the main reason why Mega Man 3 is Inafune's least favorite game in the Classic series.
  • The original plan for the game was for the Break Man fights to have a logical progression, with story moments before and after each fight. Unfortunately, the rushed development and the implementation of stage select (which prevented the development team from being able to easily say that, for example, the encounter on Gemini Man's stage would happen first to set everything up) made it impossible to add. Instead, the Break Man battles are just seemingly random attacks from a red robot, and the encounter on Gemini Man's stage is just confusing.
  • As revealed in the Complete Works book, the original concept for Top Man's stage was lost when someone accidentally tripped over a cord, losing all progress towards building the stage. The entire level had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and this may be part of why there's little thematic unification between Top Man and his stage (which, as a giant greenhouse, seems more fitting for a plant-themed Robot Master) outside of one mook and a series of spinning platforms near the end of the stage.
  • Proto Man was originally meant to have visible hair, but was given a helmet as the developers were worried that players would think Mega Man was attacking a human being. Despite this, both the Japanese manual and commercial for the game briefly feature Proto Man's original helmetless design.
  • An alternate partner for Mega Man early on was a bird robot, who was dropped in favour of a dog. The bird character would later become the base concept for Beat in Mega Man 5.
  • A tool mentioned in early previews was the "Rush Drill", which would have been used to dig holes in the ground (whether it was only for specific spots or not is unknown). Concept art for it was drawn, but the tool never made it into the game.
  • One early design for Doc Robot fitted it with multiple generic weapons (including Wolverine Claws and hip grenades), while another was more of a chimera of the Mega Man 2 Robot Masters. Both were likely rejected due to the difficulty of depicting such a level of detail on the NES.

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