Video games have given us so many beloved fictional lands over the years, each one vivid and iconic: the Mushroom Kingdom, Hyrule, Panau, Skyrim, Monsteropolis... what?  Surely you remember Monsteropolis.  You've certainly visited it dozens of times over the years.  After all, Capcom's original Mega Man for the Nintendo Entertainment System establishes the blue bomber's home turf as Monsteropolis not only on the back of the legendarily weird box, but it's all over the instruction manual as well.  So where did this strange name come from and was it part of the original Japanese storyline?  Was it introduced by the localization team?  Legends of Localization does the research and traces the legacy of Monsteropolis.

So here’s a Mega Man question that I’ve been meaning to get to for ages:

Back on the subject of the early Mega Man games, The original US manuals refereed to kept changing the name of the city the games take place in. The first game called it something like Monsteropolis, while a later game called it Mega City. I wonder what this is the the Japanese versions, if there even is a city name at all?

Wow, it’s been a long time since I actually had a copy of the Mega Man 1 box or manual, but I still remember that Monsteropolis name! It was so weird and out of place that I guess it wound up being that memorable; I guess the fact it was all over the back cover and written in bold helped.

Capcom dropped the Monsteropolis name after the first game in the series.  It's for the best, as it's a complete misnomer.  There are no monsters in Mega Man's world, just angry robots and killer machinery.  I'd expect to find Simon Belmont whipping vampires in a place called Monsteropolis, not a plucky blue robot blasting manic machines.  I'm glad that Clyde Mandelin and his Legends of Localizations project exists.  He's working hard to answer all of those strange little translation questions so many of us have had since childhood.