Build Your Own Evil Robot Master
Great for birthday parties and world domination.
written by Mike on October 4, 2025

The only times I ever remember my parents telling me to clean my room was whenever we were expecting company. Other than that, they seemed content with my apparent need to keep things comfortably & reasonably unkept. A pile of half-read books here, a tower of CDs out of their jewel cases waiting to be reorganized there, a mess of Nintendo controllers on the floor. A comfortable mess. Proof that if I die before I wake, that I'd been busy living the days before. Or, if you're my high school art teacher, reason to give me nothing higher than straight C-plusses. She was the Julio Franco of the Catholic sisterhood. Or, if you don't get baseball jokes, I'd wager that she can't be any younger than 112.

So goes the short version of the story of the near-death experience of my passion for drawing. And with it apparently went most of the evidence that it even existed between the ages of five & fifteen. To be fair, this is mostly my creativity found its way into the world via chalk board. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster
I always wanted to be a mad scientist
I always had at least one chalk board in the house. At one point, there were four lined up in a corner, two in a row on each wall. This was the canvas for my stream of consciousness.

The chalk boards are long gone now. I don't know what happened to them. Vanished while I was away at college. They were probably moved back into my mother's classroom. Either that, or in some landfill in Jersey. But every once in a while, I'll come across a little reminder of the extent of my toddler-pig-encouraged imagina-she-onne that's been salvaged on paper instead of chalk. This usually happens when my room crosses the line from "comfortable mess" to "alright I'm starting to forget where I put things," & I decide to clean it up a little. My attention span will take me as far as the closet, & there all thoughts of "Let's put things back in here" are lost in favor of "Hey let's see what I can find on the top shelf." This is how I find things like old drawing books, board games & pieces to Halloween costumes from at least a decade ago.

A few days ago, the buried closet treasure took the form of an old notebook. The spiraly notepad kind that flips upwards. Inside I was not the least surprised to find notes of ideas related to the one thing that made up no less than 70 percent of my stream of consciousness from ages 8 to about 15...

Nintendo.

There weren't a lot of sketches in the book. Mostly just codes, passwords, the occasional map, & several series of letters that I immediately recognized as sequences I experimented with in the Mega Man games.

Mega Man, for those of you who didn't have the good fortune of knowing him, was a little blue robot boy whose goal was to stop the mad scientist Dr. Wily & his robot army from taking over the world. To do this, Mega Man could turn his hand into a gun & steal robot bosses' fun little theme weapons when he beat them. That's the other thing; Dr. Wily gave each of his robot bosses a special power. Ice Man shot ice, Snake Man shot snakes, Quick Man was really fast, Wave Man threw water at you, Guts Man would try & hit you with a giant piece of the Aggro Crag, etc.

The twist that separated Mega Man from other platform games of its time was that it gave you the option of which levels you wanted to play in whatever order you wanted. Usually there was a secret order to play through the levels quickly & efficiently, but after doing that so many times, I started to get bored & make up my own sequences. A few of these were in the notebook that I found. Try beating Heat Man first & saving Metal Man for last. Try starting with Elec Man & ending with Cut Man. Those of you who have played the games know that those aren't simple tasks.

One page in particular caught me by surprise in that the letter sequence didn't match up to the names of the boss characters in any existing Mega Man game.

Peanut Butter 'n Jelly what now?

Sometimes the power of my own memory just downright frightens me. No, the letters didn't represent robot masters from any existing Mega Man game. They represented ones that I made up for a contest that I don't think ever found its way to its destination: Redmond, Washington.

After about the third Mega Man game, Capcom of Japan decided to hold a contest to let the game's fans make up their own robot masters, the very best winning their place in the next Mega Man game. I knew about this, & hoped they'd give Americans a shot someday. So I started making up my own bad guys, dozens of them, each with their own little theme power & level. I'd design them & play out their orders on the chalk board. Water Man's weapon worked well against Burn Man. Jungle Man's level was a lot easier after you beat Rain Man, who had a particular weakness against... I don't know, Judge Wapner Man. And so on, until finally, someone must have taken notice that there was a lot more than just one idiot kid inventing robots who were only good at one thing each, putting them in empty rooms, & calling it a near-brilliant plan for world domination.

In late 1992, Nintendo Power held a contest that gave us North Americans a chance to submit our own ideas for potential robot masters to Capcom. Two entries would eventually make it into Mega Man 6. The rest were published in Nintendo Power's January 1993 issue. I didn't mess around. I went all out & picked a whole arsenal of 8 to enter into the contest. None of them even made it into the magazine. Maybe I included too many entries. Maybe they never made it there. Usually Nintendo Power sends a thank you letter back. I never got one of those. And the only traces of my robot mastery left were lost to the deepest recesses of my mind until the other day, when they saw their initials written in pencil on a 13-year-old notebook.

So I decided to take my vague memories of what my robot bad guys looked like & rebuild them. Faster, stronger, & less sloppy preteenish. Prepare yourself, Mega Fools, for the eight robotic henchmen of Mike Fireball.

Jet Man. I originally invented Jet Man as a means of secret communication between my friends at the playground, but then my dad switched it with song my sister wrote for a contest, & Jet Man ended up becoming the winning hit single by accident.

No it didn't. Just kidding. It was actually supposed to be understood that Jet Man's level was an air base take on the recurring theme of "hey look we're up high in the clouds watch out don't fall." I wanted to extend the powers that Mega Man got from each robot master farther than just a new gun & different colored boots. So Jet Man would not only give you a missile weapon, but it would also let you do a dash in the air. But I think I might've ended up scrapping Jet Man because he was trying to be too much like AC/DC Man. Or maybe I just regreat drawing the cockpit window on his back. Like I'm expecting little guys to come parachuting out of it & attack you with guns or something.

Ninja Man. The purpose of Ninja Man was to flip out & kill people to have a bad guy with an awesome sword that Mega Man could use. Technically, Capcom already had their robot ninja in the form of Shadow Man. But he was a sissy who lived in a lava factory & shot throwing stars at me until I did that figure skating triple axle spin at his face & killed him. Nancy Kerrigan could beat up Shadow Man. Ninja Man had a katana. I almost gave him a bo staff or nunchucks, but decided that sharp, steel objects worked better on guys made out of metal. And I was contemplating on giving him the power to teleport in a cloud of smoke, but I wasn't sure if that was really Ninja Manish.

Who would win in a fight between Ninja Man & Pirate Man? Try playing the levels in different orders, and see which one works best for you! And remember that a true ninja never uses drugs. Also, I like how I drew him so that it looks like if you tear off his arm with the sword on it, you become the King of England. The best way to do this would be to have Wizard Man turn you into a bunch of different forest creatures & take you on wacky adventures.

Gas Man. My brother deserves most of the credit for this one. Only he called him Odor Man & was originally a walking robot fart joke. LOL he's wearing a gas mask. Then I figured it might be a little too crass for a Nintendo game. Actually, I didn't care about that. I just remembered that robots don't have a sense of smell. So I got rid of his skunk tail, changed his name to Gas Man, & made his power a thick gas cloud that you could ride on until it hit something & exploded.

As an afterthought, I'm not sure why I made Gas Man look like he has an angry, bald Phillie Phanatic head. And now here is a picture with Gas Man & his friend, President Gas Man.

This is why they don't make any new classic Mega Man games. Because some idiot kid in an anarchy shirt would invent a Weapons of Mass Destruction Man & make his lair in a completely different level.

Spike Man. It seems like every evil mastermind that tries to take over the world or at least kidnap someone pretty loves to line random areas with the floor with sharp spikes. They're a staple to platform video games. Don't step on the spikes! They kill you! Mega Man loses all of his power if he so much as touches a spike. So why doesn't Dr. Wily just make a robot with spikes on his armor? Doyyyy.

If Mega Man could beat him, Spike Man's weapon was supposed to let him walk on spikes without dying, & of course shoot out little spiked brass knuckle hands. See, I gave those to Spike Man. And after I also gave him steel-toed, spiked boots (the better to jump on you with), I decided that he might as well look like a bouncer. So that's why he's wearing the hat. My idea was that he'd throw it off after you got his power down to about half & started pissing him off. Then he'd have some spikes on his head & try to ram you with a head butt. Luckily, Mega Man can stop him dead in his tracks with the weapon he got from Faye Valentine Man.

Ok, I just creeped myself out with that one.

Lava Man. Fire-based robot masters are probably a little too commonplace in Mega Man games. But lava is as much a one-hit-death staple of platform games as spikes are, so I decided to make a Lava Man, too. I based him on a Hawaiin tiki god statue & envisioned his level to be an island where you started at the shore & climbed up a volcano to face Lava Man at the summit. Instead of outlining this on the chalk board, I took the cushions off the couch & pretended they were stepping stones. Then I pretended to use Lava Man's weapon to scare the crap out of Bobby Brady Man.

Yeti Man. If you beat Yeti Man, you were supposed to gain the power of freezing wind or a snowball that gets bigger as you roll it or something. I wanted Yeti Man to hide in the snow. Then his eyes would blink & he'd jump out at you in a ball of fury. But somewhere along the line, I ended up making him look more like a fat version of Trap Jaw from He-Man.

I guess I should make a joke about how He-Man is the best weapon to use against Yeti Man. Maybe I should've made Loch Ness Monster Man instead. Pay him $3.50 & you get the noise-polluting Bagpipe Blast.

Vampire Man. My original idea for Vampire Man was that he threw lightning at you & could also walk on the ceiling. And maybe bite your neck & make you leak oil. A vampire-themed robot did eventually make it into Mega Man 7. Except his name was Shade Man & it hurt when he screamed at you. Also he kind of reminded me of Cold Heart from the Care Bears with a receeding hairline, fangs & a cape. And it hurt when he screamed at you. Whatever you do, please don't confuse my idea with Vampyre Man, who looks like a Marilyn Manson fan wearing all leather & make up. You can, of course, get rid of him easily by using Quarterback Man's weapon.

Brick Man. Brick Man's cannon was supposed to create a solid brick wall that he'd hammer down in front of him with his fist. Whoever at Capcom was in charge of choosing the bad guys in every Mega Man game seemed to be big fans of recurring themes like fire, water, & things that spun around you like a force field. In just about every game in the series, there's one enemy whose sole purpose of existing was to get killed by a robot boy in a blue diaper & grant him the power to break certain obstructions blocking his path, most famously Crash Man, Drill Man & Hard Man. Brick Man was supposed to be an almost reversal of that concept. Mega Man could use this weapon both to crush anything right in front of him, & more conveniently to create a step to jump on & reach higher ground. Or I think if you held the button in, he'd punch the wall out in front of him. The weapon would've been very effective against big, bat robot wolves, making them much easier to defeat than if you used Straw Man or Stick Man's weapons against them.

The idea behind Brick Man was that his torso was made up of two halves of a cinder brick. So if you shot him in the stomach with a normal weapon, it'd go right through him. He also wore one of those hard hats like the little Met guys, so you couldn't shoot when he ducked his head under it. One thing about being a kid who played any sort of fight scenario was that any heroes or bad guys you invented that you wanted to see succeed would eventually play a stupid "special armor" Trump card in a desperate attempt at eternal life. Or at least making your guy a lot more difficult to kill. Such was the goal for Brick Man. Make him hard to beat. Your only options were to either shoot him in the face or in the feet. Or to accept Jesus into your heart & get your own eternal life special armor. The Catholic Church teaches that the Game Genie code for infinite energy actually becomes the bod of Christ. This is known as transubstantiation.

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Well, it was good to remember those dumb little ideas of mine & let them see the light of day. It would've been nice to see them reach Nintendo Power's doorstep & maybe even make it into a game. But now that I think about it, it's better than having them end up on some custom sprite website with terrible profiles & awkward fan fiction. They're evil robots. They sit in their rooms until someone shows up to fight them. Ninja Man doesn't like baseball & dislike dogs. Vampire Man doesn't have a blood type. He's a robot. A made-up robot by 12-year-old Mike Fireball.

He thanks you for looking at his ideas, by the way. As for the 13-year-old notebook, it woke up one morning & turned into Jennifer Garner.

And all I'm left with is a comfortable mess of thought. My brain's closet could use some straightening. I wonder what I'll find.