At PAX Prime, Keiji Inafune recounted his time with Capcom. He started as an artist, but since there weren’t many people at the company he jumped right into being a lead artist. Even though Capcom’s offices were close to his home, he wasn’t able to go home since he was working on long hours.
Inafune started working on character design for the first Street Fighter, but just a month in he shifted to work on Mega Man. Inafune said the majority of his career was related to Mega Man and the series has taught him a lot about game creation.
Why is Mega Man blue? Inafune explained that while the team wanted to make a blue character and Inafune said that was "gross." However, the team said on the Famicom or NES the color palette for blue was a larger variety than any other color so they could be more descriptive with the character design. After that he accepted having a blue lead character and at the time a blue robot was new.
Inafune decided to change Mega Man’s color when he gets new weapons because he felt it would be weird to have a blue character shoot red flames after grabbing Fire Man’s power. During this era at Capcom, the company mostly did arcade ports so Mega Man was a source of pride since this was an original game for consoles. The team knew they were doing something special.
