…but he hurt his back, and now can only jump. Nah, I made that last part up. But Mega Man’s daddy, Keiji Inafune, said that he did have a crouch function in the first game. On crouching, Inafune revealed:
I’ve often heard people say, ‘Mega Man can’t crouch,’ but we actually had a dot graphic of him crouching while we were working on 1. On the NES, with only a split second to see the slight height difference, the player wouldn’t really be able to differentiate between a projectile that could only be dodged by jumping, and one that could only be dodged by crouching. That was the reason why we decided to go with a jumping-only system for Mega Man 1 and 2, and I think we did a good job refining it.
This came from the collection Mega Man: Official Complete Works, which also revealed much more about the Blue Bomber. Rockman Corner has plenty more where that came from, Mega Man fans.
