JAPAN GAMING & ENTERTAINMENT 
One of the Robot Masters in Mega Man: Dual Override was drawn by a member of the public, and the shortlist it is on was picked by a public vote. Capcom took about 10,000 entries, cut them down to 20 in-house, and handed the next round over: a fan vote, open to anyone with a free CAPCOM ID, brought the field to six. Those votes were counted as a single total across Japan, the Americas, Europe and Asia, so a ballot cast in North America weighed exactly as much as one cast in Japan.
Six designs are still standing. The development team picks one of them, and that one becomes a boss in the finished game, due in 2027. Capcom has not said which, and has not said when it will say.
What the contest actually asked for
Capcom announced Dual Override and the Robot Master Design Contest on the same night, at The Game Awards in December 2025. The brief was narrow: a Robot Master with a right arm that has immense suction power. Capcom supplied a template drawing of the body under the placeholder name Robot with Suction Arm (Temp), and entries stayed open until the start of January 2026. About 10,000 came in.
Capcom’s own staff handled the first cut, down to 20. Voting opened at the end of January and closed in early February, with the CAPCOM ID as the only gate — registration is free, and voters were given a social media icon for taking part. The six winners were revealed in March, during a Capcom Spotlight stream. All six entrants get their names in the game’s credits, whether or not their robot is the one that ships.
What the official contest page does not do is name them: it labels the entries Design A through Design T. The last pick belongs to the development team, and the page says only that the announcement will come later.
Three stages per Robot Master
Dual Override is a side-scrolling 2D action game. Each Robot Master sits behind three stages, and the fight comes at the end of the third. Those stages are also where the screws are, and screws pay for Custom Chips: chips get built, equipped and swapped to make Mega Man stronger, and some of them cannot be equipped at the same time.
The other new system is Override. A gauge fills, the player triggers it for a timed burst of power, and when it runs out there is a penalty on the way down. Bosses use it too. It takes the place of the Double Gear system from Mega Man 11. The development team has described the difficulty as built around repeated attempts, with the step-by-step growth from Custom Chips as the counterweight.
Capcom is both developing and publishing. The game is due in 2027 with no date attached, on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well; on PC it goes to Steam and the Epic Games Store. English is among the languages Capcom has listed, and no announcement has been made yet about English voice work.
Proto Man is playable, and the fireworks robot came first
The gamescom Opening Night Live trailer in August added a second playable character: Proto Man, a shield user described as a technician, who plays differently from Mega Man. Astro Man, from Mega Man 8, is back as well. And the trailer introduced a new Robot Master — Twinkle Girl, a rookie entertainer robot who works with fireworks.
Dual Override is the twelfth game in this line, and Twinkle Girl is the first female Robot Master in it since Splash Woman in Mega Man 9, eighteen years ago. In an interview published by Japanese games outlets in August, series producer Shingo Izumi said that when the earlier games were made, the prevailing image was that a strong robot was a boy; girl heroes are mainstream now, he said, and a strong female robot follows from that. Director Shinya Ikuta said the team worked without treating Robot Masters as male by default, and that Twinkle Girl was the first character the team built.
Nine years, and no number
The last full new entry was Mega Man 11, in 2018. 2027 is the fortieth anniversary of the series, and Izumi has said the anniversary built momentum inside Capcom for getting a full new game out, with the team’s drive fed by regret at not having managed one for the thirty-fifth. There is still no number on the title, which Izumi has explained as deliberate: it is meant to lower the barrier for players coming in cold.
September 16, then September 17
The next date is September 16, when Capcom runs a Capcom Spotlight stream for Tokyo Game Show 2026 at 7 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Eastern, with Dual Override alongside Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance, Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen and Street Fighter 6. Capcom notes that the date and time can still change. Tokyo Game Show itself opens the following day, September 17, at Makuhari Messe — business days first, with the public days running September 19 to 21 — and that is where the game gets played on the show floor: attendees take Mega Man through Twinkle Girl’s first three stages, Override included.
Capcom has not said whether the grand-prize design turns up at either event. What is settled is that one of those six designs will be standing in a Mega Man game in 2027, and that the people who drew them are waiting on the answer along with everyone who voted.
Sources: Capcom’s official Mega Man: Dual Override site and Robot Master Design Contest page; Capcom’s official Tokyo Game Show 2026 site; Capcom’s press releases; the game’s Steam store page; Famitsu, 4Gamer.net, Game*Spark, AUTOMATON, Dengeki Online, GAME Watch and gamebiz. Developer comments come from Japanese-language interviews.