Doctor Thomas Light
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| Dr. Light, as seen in Mega Man 9 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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- "Sometimes, peace cannot be achieved unless those who spread war are destroyed."
- ―Dr. Light, Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters
Doctor Thomas Light, known as Doctor Thomas Right (トーマス・ライト博士 Tōmasu Raito Hakase) in Japan, is a character from the Mega Man Classic and Mega Man X series. He has appeared in all main series MaGMML games thus far, serving as mission control for Mega Man, with his lab being explorable. He also makes an extremely brief appearance in the MaGMML spin off title, Make a Good Mega Man Level: Episode Zero, where he is seen in the game's credits being approached by the mayor of Mega City.
Before the first Mega Man game
In the 20th century, Thomas Light attended the Robot Institute of Technology (ローバート工科大学 Robert Institute of Technology) where he met Albert W. Wily. The two became classmates and graduated together with their doctorate degrees (PhDs), although Light always received more credit than Wily. The two were nominated for the Nobel Prize for physics, but only Dr. Light won. Dr. Wily, with his pride hurt and tired of being in second place, vanished, and Dr. Light didn't see him again until the events of the first game. At an unknown time, Dr. Light (alongside Dr. Wily in some sources outside of Japan) founded his laboratory to further the development of computing and robotics technology for the benefit of mankind in the coming era. Light became a world-renowned scientist and the leading expert on robotics.
Light soon built a series of household and civil service robots. Not long after that, he created a humanoid robot with a much more advanced A.I., DLN-000 Proto Man, the first "advanced robot", known as a Robot Master in some sources. However, Proto Man's dangerous imbalance in his energy core and having a strong sense of independence led to him going AWOL before his repairs were complete in fear that his personality would change in the process. Later, in the year 200X (sometime in the first decade of the 21st century), Light would build on the successes and failures of the Proto Man project to build other Robot Masters, like Rock (a lab assistant, also known as Mega), Roll (a householder), and a series of industrial robots.
When Dr. Wily grew jealous of Light's works receiving credit and his works not (in U.S.A. sources, Wily is jealous because Light received all the credit for the team's work), he stole and reprogrammed Light's industrial robots, attempting to take over the world. Rock, having a strong sense of justice, volunteered to be converted into the super fighting robot known as Mega Man. Light, being a pacifist, was at first reluctant to go through with the operation, but he eventually agreed to it, leading to the seemingly eternal rivalry between Mega Man and Dr. Wily that still rages on to this day.
Notes
- If the Dr. Light costume is worn during Make a Good Mega Man Level 3's awards ceremony cutscene, Light's full name is stated to be Dr. Thomas Xavier Light. The middle name is a reference to The Official Guide to Mega Man, an old American guidebook for Mega Man 1, 2, 3 and Dr. Wily's Revenge that included various pieces of made up, non-canonical lore, including referring to Light as "Xavier Wright".
