Megatron (WFC)

The name or term "Megatron" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Megatron (disambiguation).

Megatron is a Decepticon from the Transformers: Prime continuity family.

He wants the whole world, in his hand.

The Transformer designated D-16 took the legendary name Megatronus as his own and rose from the oppressed lower working castes of Kaon. Finding his true purpose and direction in the region's illegal gladiatorial games, he was redubbed Megatron by the crowds and rode his unmatched power and combat skills to fame and influence. Megatron's call for an upheaval of Cybertron's society, his insistence that the freedom of self-determination was the right of all sentient beings, drew many of the oppressed and dissaffected to his cause.

But power corrupts, and Megatron's revolution, like many such movements, quickly turned to tyranny. Powerful, charismatic, violent, and full of rage for any who would stand in the way of his ambition and drive it doesn't take Megatron and his Decepticon armies long to bring Cybertron to the brink of destruction.

I am the Dominator. I am the Destroyer. I am Megatron!Megatron, Transformers: War for Cybertron

Fiction

Exodus: The Official History of the War for Cybertron

Like all miners, Megatron was not given a name when he emerged from the Well of All Sparks and put to work in Kaon. He nicknamed himself D-16 after the sector of the mine where he performed demolition operations. It was there he became the gladiator Megatronus, and in killing other gladiators he and others began to appreciate the value of life. As he continued to go undefeated in battle, gladiatorial bosses requested Megatron lose a few fights. Megatronus refused to have someone dictate his own life, and killed them, taking over the rings in Kaon and Slaughter City. Gaining an army of gladiators, Megatronus appointed Soundwave and Shockwave his lieutenants. After defeating the latter's experimental Insecticon combiner in the ring, the crowd began chanting a shortened version of his name: Megatron.

On that day, Megatron's calls to abolish the caste system on the Grid attracted the attention of Orion Pax and Alpha Trion in the Hall of Records all the way in Iacon. Orion contacted Megatron on a secret frequency and began exchanging their ideas in intense but friendly philosophical discussions. Orion asked why Megatron had assumed the name of one of the thirteen original Transformers: he replied that all the Thirteen failed their mission, and likewise the principles Megatron believed in had fallen away in Cybertronian society. He encouraged Orion to learn self defense and to visit Kaon, which he did to a warm welcome from Megatron (and from none of his soldiers).

It was then terrorist attacks took place with the perpetrators claiming to do so in Megatron's name. Megatron and Orion subsequently made public speeches on the Grid claiming his innocence, and that he would bring those extremists to justice. But within a cycle Six Lasers Over Cybertron, Uraya, Polyhex, Stanix, Blaster City and the Sonic Canyons had been bombed with great loss of life, and civilians were baying for Megatron's head. Megatron asked Orion not to leave upset, addressing him as "brother" for the first time. Later he took him to an gladiatorial pit below the Observatory of Iacon, showing how this form of bloodshed had spread all over Cybertron. He also admitted to Orion's surprise that he had known about the attacks, but had done nothing to stop his followers from carrying them out.

When Sentinel Prime went missing during a "Decepticon" attack on Altihex, he had actually been delivered by his bodyguard Starscream to Kaon, a gift Megatron accepted willingly. Megatron asked Starscream if he would join him, but Starscream was reluctant as the revolution was still in its infancy, and carefully chose to occupy Moon Base One and Trypticon Station instead of being directly involved. Megatron asked Orion to investigate why Starscream would occupy a "semi-sentient pile of junk" like Trypticon, but he was unable to find any clues, which much of Trypticon's history on the DataNet being classified.

Alpha Trion organized a hearing for Orion and Megatron with the High Council. They protested involvement in Sentinel's disappearance. When confronted with the phrase "Decepticon", Megatron accepted his followers' term wholeheartedly, stating deception was necessary sometimes for the corrupt to see the truth. When Halogen revealed Megatron's followers had been trying to locate the Matrix of Leadership, he declared that Orion should become the Prime that he desperately wanted to lead Cybertron into the new Golden Age, and find it. Incensed, Megatron killed Halogen, and when Optimus prevented the Elite Guard from attacking Megatron, the ungrateful gladiator declared Optimus had fallen into the trap of power the High Council had given him. He declared Optimus was no longer his brother, and that the Matrix would be his.

In the subsequent war with Optimus's Autobots, the Decepticons took control of eighty-five percent of the planet. Wherever Starscream's Seekers aided, they were victorious. Megatron was initially merciful to neutrals, but he let Shockwave take control of Tarn and torture Autobot sympathizers there. When the Praxians, a progressive city-state who were disappointed with the direction Megatron took, allied with the Autobots, Megatron decided he would no longer try to convert followers and launched the first genocide of the war, slaughtering all in Nova Cronum who would not submit to the Decepticons as they attacked.

As the war dragged into a siege of Iacon, Soundwave's spying bore fruit as he discovered Dark Energon, the essence of Unicron, was aboard Trypticon. Megatron forgave Starscream for hiding its existence from him, acknowledging its potentially dangerous nature. To ensure loyalty, Megatron's gladiators stormed the Station slaughtering and maiming Starscream's scientists. He forced Starscream to pick two test subjects to be Darkened, and following an astonishingly successful result, Megatron absorbed some, invigorating him. Soon Darkened Decepticons appeared on the battlefield, but it proved to be an inefficient resource and they would have to flee if a battle was prolonged. Megatron needed more, and even Starscream's activation of the Geosynchronous Energon Bridge didn't provide enough. Megatron felt he would kill all the Decepticons before he was deprived of Dark Energon, rather than becoming deprived and turn rabid.

Fortunately, Soundwave revealed the existence of the Plasma Energy Chamber within Teletraan-1, which required the Code Keys of Power and Justice to activate it. Starscream recovered the Key of Power from the Hall of Justice, while Megatron and his best soldiers searched for the Key of Justice below. Sentinel Prime emerged to Megatron's surprise. Sentinel asked Megatron about Bumper and Fastback, two security agents he sent to investigate him when Megatron was still a gladiatorial boss and that he had killed. Megatron replied two lives were worthless compared to the millions doomed by the castes Sentinel created. The two dueled, and Megatron disarmed and sliced open Sentinel, exposing the Key of Justice within. Starscream made a grab for it, revealing he had released Sentinel to kill Megatron and take leadership for himself. After fighting Starscream to a standstill, Megatron forgave him as he found him a better soldier than would-be example, and used the Keys to open Teletraan-1: which activated Omega Supreme to fly the Chamber to safety.

The Seekers shot Omega Supreme out of the air, causing him to crash. Optimus's Autobots arrived to fight the Decepticons, but the more they killed them the more Dark Energon left their bodies and empowered Megatron. He was able to knee Omega Supreme and turn him on his back, tearing the Chamber out of his chest. Using the Chamber, Megatron poisoned the core of Cybertron and Darkened the entire planet. But then the core stopped producing Dark Energon, and Megatron learnt Optimus had gone to the core and received the Matrix. As the Autobots attempted to flee Cybertron via the last space bridge, Megatron used Trypticon to fire on their ships, and used his and Orion's old frequency to criticize Optimus for fleeing. He added he never believed in individual freedom for every Cybertronian, only the illusion of freedom that he as leader would provide and that the Guilds did not. Optimus responded that Megatron had turned his soldiers into addicts and they would turn on him, and used the Eight Track to board, sabotage and crash Trypticon.

As the Autobots left on the completed Ark, the Decepticons fully invaded Iacon. Megatron ordered Trypticon to transform into the Nemesis, boarding it with Starscream, Soundwave, Lugnut and other elite soldiers, leaving Shockwave in charge. He used his old frequency once again to warn Optimus that he would hound him through the stars and finally kill him for the Matrix. He began addressing him as brother again, noting they were bonded for life despite their emnity. Optimus was just glad his hunt would get him off Cybertron. The two ships entered the last space bridge together, and when the Ark emerged, the Nemesis was gone. Exodus: The Official History of the War for Cybertron

Prime cartoon

Voice actor: Frank Welker (English)

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Games

Transformers: War for Cybertron (Xbox 360/PS3/PC)

Voice actor: Fred Tatasciore (English), Oliviero Corbetta (Italian)

During the early war on Cybertron, Megatron found reference to an energy source called Dark Energon, which had impressive potential as a weapon, and became determined to claim it for himself. One of the few places it was made was in a station in orbit around Cybertron, guarded by a politically neutral force led by Starscream. With this knowledge, he took a ship and launched an assault on the station.

The ship was badly damaged in the attack, and so he ordered Barricade and Brawl, piloting it, to ram the station. He and many of his soldiers survived the impact and escaped the core's detonation. only to be confronted by Starscream, who informed them that they would not allow them to take what he had guarded for ten thousand years. After surviving a trap of sentry guns, Megatron, Barricade, and Brawl were reinforced by more of Megatron's toops, and set out on their way to find the station's Dark Energon stores and claim them for the war effort. They encountered significant resistance, but managed to shoot their way through, with directional aid from Soundwave. Barricade noted that the station itself seemed quite primitive; Megatron noted it was very old, and that he intended to modernize it... At one point, the Seeker Jetfire confronted Megatron nonviolently, asking him to give up his quest, as Dark Energon would result in only horror, death, and destruction, to which Megatron sneered, "You say that as if it were a bad thing."

Along their way to the Dark Energon, they found that a large portion of the station had been blasted clean off, the debris field traversible but sparse enough to allow easy viewing of Cybertron itself. Soundwave soon found records indicating that a small amount of Dark Energon lost containment and was the sole cause of the destruction, underscoring Megatron's desire for it. When Barricade asked how he expected to control it when no other had, Megatron said that such power was only for the strong, that he was the strongest, and not to question him again.

When they finally reached the storage chamber, and Megatron averted Starscream's destruction of it, he calmly entered into a container full of raw Dark Energon, while Starscream watched and gloated at his imminent destruction...only for him to walk out, not only unscathed, but crackling with power, which he further bestowed upon Barricade and Brawl. A single blast of Dark Energon was enough to destroy an entire company of station security forces, the last line of defense between Megatron and Starscream and his companions.

Jetfire again tried to warn Megatron about the dangers of Dark Energon, but Starscream interrupted, askeing to join the Decepticon leader. Megatron asked Starscream offered that Megatron could not simply take. Starscream revealed the station's supply of Dark Energon was almost spent, and he knew how to manufacture more--and as luck would have it, there was a dormant Energon Bridge which could be used to power it. Jetfire retreated to inform Zeta Prime; Megatron let him go, seeming pleased by the notion of letting the Autobots tremble in advance of their actions, and sent Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp to activate the bridge.

Megatron repeatedly mocked what he perceived as Starscream's slowness in his simple mission, but the Seeker did what he said he could. With a steady supply of Dark Energon, Megatron launched an attack on Iacon City, intending to take a device called the Omega Key and use it to enter the Core of Cybertron. This time, he took Breakdown and with him. The trio took the less-guarded way in--which, since the Autobots were not complete fools (as even Megatron would admit), still had significant military presence. During the attack, Starscream noted that Dark Energon was proving every bit as potent as Megatron had promised. Breakdown let Megatron know of his misgivings about the Sky Commander; Megatron admitted he was treacherous and untrustworthy, but he had useful talents, and his cunning and ambition was intriguing.

The Omega Key had been taken from its normal resting place, however, byAutobot leader Zeta Prime, and so Megatron took his squad to an assault on Zeta's headquarters. They met Brawl, leading an attack on the doors to Zeta Prime's armory, along the way. Even Megatron's touch of Dark Energon could not breach the vault doors, however, and so he called in bombers. When they were shot down, Brawl suggested they take out the Autobots' air defense guns, after which bombers were called in again; Megatron's troops then held off a massive assault from what seemed like the entire Autobot army while waiting for the bombing run to finally arrive.

After the vault doors were breached, they reached Zeta Prime himself, who had constructed several layers of security while he waited. An invincible energy field protected him, while he could drop portions of the ceiling with pistons to crush anything beneath them, and construct endless clones of himself outfitted for melee combat, which Megatron personally found nauseating. However, his defenses with not without flaw: periodically, the power core would need to disperse waste heat, and Megatron's team survived long enough to destroy it during this stage. Zeta fell, buried under the wreckage of his own defenses, and Megatron took the device he'd carried...which started to make electronic chirping noises. Zeta, with black humor, noted that the device was not the Omega Key. It merely activated the Key, which would come to them...

Searching for the Key in the skies aboard another ship, Megatron, with Soundwave and Breakdown at the controls, were abruptly confronted by a massive ship, Omega Supreme), who knocked them out of the sky, causing them to crash back in Iacon. There, they played a cat-and-mouse campaign in a desperate attempt to survive the enormous Autobot's vast firepower, though Soundwave noted that the weaponry they bore had little chance of penetrating Omega Supreme's armor. Megatron, for his part, at least contrived to appear unafraid, claiming that if it came to a real fight, the brute wouldn't stand a chance against Megatron's intellect. However, Omega's attacks drove them underground and left them unable to immediately transmit counter to Starscream, who declared Megatron dead and announced he was taking control. Even when they re-established contact, Starscream's aerial forces only briefly distracted Omega, who dispensed large numbers of troops, sucked up Decepticons with a tractor beam, fired weapons of mass destruction, and mined the roads Megatron and his squad.

Soundwave, however, had come up with a suggestion--there were weapons emplacements higher up that had the ability to damage Omega Supreme. Taking them from the Autobots was a battle in and of itself, but nothing compared to the fight against Omega Supreme, who could unload entire squadrons of Aerialbots. Nonetheless, Megatron's boldness and tactical acumen finally shot Omega Supreme out of the sky. Gloating, Megatron found that the behemoth was still not defeated, and indeed was drawing power from Cybertron itself to repair his systems, making him stronger, if anything. However, by corrupting the energon batteries which he was using to feed himself with Dark Energon charges, they were able to weaken him to the point where they could finally blast away his last defenses and brought him to heel. With Omega Supreme tamed, Megatron went underground, all the way to the Core, and corrupted it with a massive infusion of Dark Energon, bringing Cybertron itself more completely under his control. At this point, Megatron was clearly convinced, and for good reason, that he'd won, making propaganda broadcasts extolling his greatness and how he had taken away the Autobots' burdens of "liberty" and "choice". When Starscream was defeated and the Decagon retaken, however, he realized the Autobots were not yet going to roll over for him, and sent a distress signal from Zeta Prime, whom he had kept alive in the Kaon prison camp, in order to provoke a rescue attempt from the Autobots. His old acquaintance Optimus took the bait, and Megatron confronted him, telling him that the war could be over tomorrow if Optimus took the Autobots and left. Optimus refused, so Megatron consigned him and his team to the prisons. When they managed to stage a mass breakout, an enraged Megatron ordered his troops to prevent their escape at any cost, to the point of tearing apart portions of Kaon.

This was not enough, however, and they escaped, journeying to the Core, where they kickstarted the cleansing of Megatron's corruption. Doing so, however, would take the Core millions of years of shutdown, rendering Cybertron uninhabitable. Whether Megatron knew this or not, when he Megatron saw the Autobots leaving after Optimus's refusal of his earlier offer, he apparently took offense. His earlier plans of renovating Starscream's station had come to fruition; now, it mounted a powerful superweapon, capable of destroying entire structures in one shot. He had it fire upon the Autobot transports as they left. When a team of Aerialbots attempted to disable or destroy it, he called Jetfire, now one of them, and taunted him about his past. He further mocked them when they destroyed the plasma coolant system without apparently having accounted for backups. Finally, during the attack he came into possession of information on Optimus Prime's location, and ordered Trypticon--the name of the weapon, for it was actually a Cybertronian--to fire upon it.

Trypticon, however, was forced into his natural form and defeated after he crash-landed on Cybertron. Megatron's reaction to this is not detailed in the game, but I think we can assume somebody died.

Transformers: War for Cybertron

Transformers: War for Cybertron (DS)

Transformers: War for Cybertron

Transformers: Cybertron Adventures

Voice actor: Fred Tatasciore (English), Oliviero Corbetta (Italian)

Transformers: Cybertron Adventures

Toys

Generations

Fashionably asymmetrical.

• Cybertronian Megatron (Deluxe, 2010)

• Accessories: clear purple missile

This toy is based on Megatron's appearance in the video game Transformers: War for Cybertron, transforming into a Cybertronian tank. His spring-loaded cannon can attach to both arms and features a machine gun based on an in-game turret, capable of being placed backwards to look like a different weapon.

Notes

• Megatron's designation as an energon miner was "D-16". Megatron's original Japanese ID number was "16". Takara would eventually change the numbering system using a "D" to denote Destrons. So Megatron's Japanese ID number could retroactively be considered "D-16".
• At a video shown at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, Welker explained his Prime voice for Megatron would be mostly toned down from his G1 counterpart, to give the character more range.
• In Transformers: War for Cybertron, Megatron has multiple glitches when controlled by the computer, among them shrinking (quite hilariously), losing his Fusion Cannon, and having his Tank mode cannon stick straight up (also humorous). He may be the most glitchy character in the game.