Dr. Wily vs. Albert Einstein
If we are talking about foundational video game series that have been inexplicably disregarded by their parent companies, we might mention Castlevania, but we might also discuss the series central to this post: Mega Man. I too have neglected these series, and so I decided to offer you something that explores the world of Mega Man — and how the Mega Man series explores the world.
The original Mega Man games establish polar opposites for good and evil scientific geniuses. On the side of good, we have Mega Man’s inventor, the benevolent Dr. Thomas Light. And on the side of evil, we have Dr. Albert Wily, who in the first game subverts Dr. Light’s robots to serve his own nefarious purposes. In later games, he’d invent his own robots to oppose Mega Man’s team and sometimes even renounce his evil ways, only to reveal in the end that no, in fact, he’s still bad. Dr. Wily serves as the antagonist of all eleven of the mainline Mega Man games, plus the Game Boy interquels as well.
Those eyebrows are how you know he’s evil.
If his actions didn’t tip you off to his evil nature, then his name should. As a common adjective, wily hints at something dangerous, as I noted in my post unpacking Guile’s name. Merriam-Webster simply puts it as “full of wiles, crafty,” but Wiktionary puts it slightly more pejoratively, as “sly, cunning, full of tricks.” This is, after all, is the same word that gives us the name of Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote, self-identified genius who comes up with idea after idea that he hopes will allow him to catch a certain desert bird that, as it turns out, is wily in his own right. However, it’s actually Dr. Wily’s first name that gets unusual traction in the canon of Capcom titles, because he’s not the only Albert to epitomize the dark side of scientific genius.
Resident Evil, a Capcom series that explores a far darker version of science fiction, has as its primary villain Dr. Albert Wesker, a megalomaniacal virologist whose experiments push the genre into outright horror. But there’s also Dead Rising, another Capcom series that explores a zombie apocalypse. One of the antagonists in Dead Rising 3 is Dr. Albert Contiello, a psychopathic surgeon. There’s even a bonus Albert in one of Mega Man spinoff franchises: Mega Man ZX Advent — the second in the ZX subseries, which takes place two centuries after the Zero series, which itself follows the X series — has as its big bad Master Albert, another megalomaniac. It might seem like a character in a Mega Man spinoff named Albert must be a callback to Albert Wily, and indeed he is part of a trio that also includes Master Thomas and Master Mikhail, who are references to Dr. Thomas Light and Dr. Mikhail Cossack, a third robot scientist who debuted in Mega Man 4. But I’d wager that the Alberts appearing in Resident Evil and Dead Rising are likely callbacks as well, just because Mega Man is so central to Capcom’s history — and Capcom is as down as any other long-lived video game company to reference its own canon.
There is, however, another potential explanation for these Alberts who have become monsters either despite or because of their scientific genius, and that leads us to the most famous Albert of all: Albert Einstein. In English at least, his name is used as a generic term for an exceptionally smart person, but while his reputation is known to the entire world even today, seventy years after he died, not everyone necessarily remembers him with such positive connotations. To gloss over a lot of history for the sake of making a point about a video game character, the perception exists that because Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², describes the energy that would be released in nuclear reactions, Einstein indirectly led to the application of this principle in the creation of nuclear weapons, including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. For obvious reasons, those bombings loom large in the memory of the Japanese people and the culture they produce, and they have been depicted literally — in, say, the manga and anime Barefoot Gen — but also metaphorically, notably in Godzilla movies. Understandably, it tends to come up a lot, kind of in the way that a lot of Japanese media mentions the ocean, just because it’s hard to get away from the ocean no matter where in Japan you go, whereas media from other countries doesn’t feature the ocean so centrally. It’s just there, part of the overall background to any story that’s told. And one of the manifestations of the collective trauma of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing is, it turns out, Dr. Wily in the Mega Man games.
In the 2008 Mega Man retrospective artbook, Mega Man & Mega Man X Official Complete Works, designer Keiji Inafune cops to Albert Einstein being the inspiration for Albert Wily’s look. He doesn’t mention whether Einstein also inspired Wily’s first name, but it seems hard to overlook, given the context.
Based on the hair, that seems to be proto-Wily on the right. The proto-Dr. Light on the left is short and squat, but I think he actually has Albert Einstein eyes, oddly enough.
Although he doesn’t say so, Dr. Light’s first name would seem to come from that of Thomas Edison. But even if the two doctor characters were just named after famous scientific geniuses, without Einstein’s connection to the atomic bomb being explicitly considered, it’s nonetheless notable that the villainous of the two was the one connected to Einstein.
Wily’s look would change before the release of the first Mega Man game, but the final product looks more like Einstein than even Inafune’s first sketch does.
Aside from the shock of gray hair, Einstein’s eyes are one of his most noticeable features, and I think the Wily design took away his glasses to show off his eyes and make it clear who the character was supposed to resemble.
It should be stated Einstein himself did not participate in the Manhattan Project, the allied effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. That might be well known to some people, but it’s at least worth noting that a section in Einstein’s profile on the Japanese version of Wikipedia specifically calls out a “widespread misconception” that Einstein’s role in the development of the bomb was more active. No such disclaimer exists on Einstein’s page on English Wikipedia, and I can only conclude that the Japanese version makes this distinction to address claims to the contrary — either on the page itself if not in Japanese culture at large. That’s how Wikipedia works, after all; a given culture writes about a given subject in a way that reflects how those people view it.
For what it’s worth, Einstein identified as a pacifist, but as one of many Jewish academics who fled their native Germany, he also realized the danger posed by Nazis researching atomic weapons. In 1939, he signed a letter written by Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard, today termed the Einstein–Szilard letter, that encouraged U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to launch what eventually did become the Manhattan Project. Einstein would later point to his signing the letter as the “one great mistake in my life.” The matter is nuanced, to say the least, and I leave it to people with a deeper understanding of world history to say how much Einstein deserves to be associated with the atomic bomb.
What this site has evolved into, I realize now, is an ongoing document of the ways in which video games reflect the world in which they were created. Real-life entities will be squeezed into pixels and polygons in ways that make these inspirations sometimes hard to spot, and I think it’s really interesting to point to a familiar character or a game element and then reveal that it’s actually a representation of a famous someone or something that we all know from an entirely different context. I mean, come on — who knew Albert Einstein was hiding in Mega Man all these years?
In the grand scheme of Einstein’s legacy, Dr. Wily is quite likely the least important aspect, long-lived though the character may be. But the next time you play a classic Mega Man, maybe this connection will make you think a little differently about preventing Wily from destroying the world.