I remember the first time that I met Doctor Light.
I couldn’t have been more than 7 years old, and I was messing with my older brother’s SNES and games against his wishes. The flashy anime art on the Mega Man X cartridge caught my attention right away, so I blew into the opening at the bottom of the grey hunk of plastic and clicked it into the console with childish gusto. I played through the first level with relative ease, only dying twice (I was a kid, okay?). I had never played a game like this before. I was used to hand-me-down NES and Gameboy games, so the sharp colors and radical music in X blew my young mind. My eyes widened as X was nearly destroyed by who I could only assume was Boba Fett, only to be saved by Zero at the last second; never before had I seen storytelling like that in a video game. From there the game opened up and I had the choice to play any of its 8 levels.
I chose the rad looking eagle stage, obviously.
And I got my ass handed to me, obviously.
After several failed attempts to vanquish even one of the game’s 8 anthropomorphic robot villains, I finally settled on Chill Penguin’s stage. The snow laden landscape stretched to the horizon, mirroring the mountainous mid-winter view outside of my own window. I shot down the level’s first enemy, a robotic jack-rabbit, with no hesitation and quickly moved on. Next came the robo-lumberjack, followed by the robot wasp (less thematic than the previous two, but I forgave the lack of cohesion). I fought my way through rolling spike wheels and red-eyed bats trailing wisps of exhaust, all the way to the top level of the icy enemy base. I jammed down the directional pad’s right prong, eager to see what came next, only to be stopped in my tracks by a futuristic pod.
A haunting melody started playing as the flickering holographic image of a bearded scientist appeared in the pod.
“So you’ve come…” he said.
I had never played a Mega Man game, I had never even heard of the series, but when Dr. Light spoke I hung on every word
“X, I gave you the ability to choose your own path in life, and I hoped that world would allow you to choose a peaceful one. But now it seems that you are destined to fight”. The portly phantasm continued. Forget the altercation with Vile earlier in the game, this was real storytelling. The combination of the grimly determined music and the unusually weighty dialogue must have been too much for my adolescent psyche, because I started to cry. To be fair I was an exceptionally weepy child, but I had never cried at a video game before.
My childish imagination was set ablaze. I ran into the living-room and demanded an explanation of the plot from my brother, and he in turn demanded that I pay him a dollar for the use of his Super Nintendo.
In the mid-90s, the kind of storytelling found in Mega Man X was usually only found in RPGS. Sure, the story had some critical plot holes and the dialogue was scarce, but compared to most other action-oriented games of the 16-bit era, X was Citizen Kane.
I played through the rest of Mega Man X with new determination; I felt an actual connection with the protagonist and the fate of the world that he lived in. I destroyed the 8 maverick robots, I stormed Sigma’s fortress, I watched Zero 
sacrifice himself to destroy Vile’s robot armor and save X, and… well Sigma was just too damn hard to beat, so after countless failed attempts I threw down the controller in a huff and went to watch Pokemon.
Despite putting the game down and not picking it up for many years, that scene always stuck with me. These days it can be easy to take for granted the stories told in older games, but X completely pushed the boundaries and defied the expectations set by previous entries in the series. Not only were the graphics and music far more advanced than the series’ 8-bit predecessors, but the story actually mattered. The plot in the Mega Man X games went on to become decidedly less great, but I’ll never forget the first time that I met Dr. Light, and the first time I realized that you can tell an actual story in a video game.
