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.

Lord of the Dark Energon wraiths.

The awesomely powerful Megatron is, in many ways, a fallen hero. He rose up from the oppressed lower working castes of Kaon to become a champion in the region's illegal deathmatches, cast aside his designation of D-16 and took the legendary name Megatronus as his own, he called for an end to Cybertron's decrepit caste system and told the downtrodden that freedom of self-determination was the right of all sentient beings!

But power corrupts and Megatron's Decepticon revolution, like many such movements, ended up becoming a whole new tyranny. Powerful, charismatic, violent, and full of rage for any who would stand in the way of his ambition and drive, Megatron brought Cybertron past the brink of destruction. Now he and his former brother-in-arms Optimus Prime fight on other worlds.

Megatron has been gone for a few years, but now he's back. Back with a rare element that lets him rule over life itself!

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

Megatron nicknamed himself D-16 after the sector of the mine where he performed demolition operations. As a gladiator, in killing others he began to appreciate the value of life, and in-between matches he became something of an intellectual, debating the castes with others miners. After bosses requested he lose a few fights, D-16 killed them and took over Kaon and Slaughter City. After murdering one boss in front of his employees, D-16 declared himself Megatronus, whom he considered the greatest of the Thirteen. After hearing his preaching on the Communication Grid against the Guilds of Cybertron, the concerned Sentinel Prime sent Bumper and Fastback to investigate. Megatronus killed them, believing two lives were worthless compared to the millions doomed by the castes Sentinel created.

After a victorious battle with the Insecticons, in which the crowd redubbed him Megatron, the gladiator was contacted by the Iaconian records monitor Orion Pax, and they began exchanging their ideas in intense but friendly philosophical discussions. Megatron encouraged Orion to learn self defense and invited him to visit Kaon, which he did to a warm welcome from Megatron (and from none of his gladiators). By this point Megatron was planning to call his movement the Decepticons, and he had begun sending his followers on a search for artifacts of the Primes, as their discovery would be signs their cause was just. His followers began bombing Cybertron, and Megatron distanced himself from their extremism to gain credibility. Orion and his mentor Alpha Trion believed him, but the latter was well aware Megatron may have gained a taste for violence after the attention it earned him. Soon enough, Megatron accepted the gift of a kidnapped Sentinel Prime from Starscream.

The High Council keeps us subjugated with overlong conversations! They must be overthrown!

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 denied any knowledge of it but 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 (though he would continue to refer to him as such privately), 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 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, while Megatron and his best soldiers searched for the Key of Justice below the High Council Tower. Sentinel Prime emerged to Megatron's surprise. Sentinel confronted him about Bumper and Fastback, and the two dueled. Megatron disarmed and sliced open Sentinel, revealing the Key of Justice within. Starscream made a grab for it, exposing that he had released Sentinel to kill Megatron and take leadership for himself. After fighting Starscream to a standstill, Megatron pardoned 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 explained they were still brothers, as they were bonded for life despite their enmity. 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)

Peek-a-boo!

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Games

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

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

He wants the whole world in his hand.

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. They were then 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 troops, 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 traversable 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, asking to join the Decepticon leader. Megatron asked what Starscream could offer that he 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 Soundwave 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, by Autobot leader Zeta Prime, and so Megatron took his squad on 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 holographic clones of himself outfitted for melee combat, which Megatron personally found nauseating. However, his defenses were 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 were using.

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 with 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 defeated, Megatron went underground, directly to the Core, and corrupted it with a massive infusion of Dark Energon, finally 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 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 went unrecorded. Transformers: War for Cybertron

Transformers: War for Cybertron (DS)

Megatron was the Decepticon Leader during the final days of the Great War. After capturing an Autobot facility, and killing a cadet, Megatron revealed his plan to his troops. Megatron intended to conquer Trypticon Space Station, which had the means and power to manufacture Dark Energon: a variant of Energon which greatly increased the stamina and strength of its' host. Megatron fought his way through the station to its' commander, the Autobot Starscream. Upon Starscream's defeat, Starscream offered his services and the Dark Energon if he was spared. Megatron agreed, and Starscream joined the Decepticons.

After a test run of the Dark Energon in Kaon Prison, Soundwave deduced the element would only kill the host, but Starscream was able to find a way to fix it. Megatron then decided the time was right, and led his army to the inner levels of Cybertron. He was able to activate the uplink to channel energy from the Core of Cybertron itself to Trypticon Station, but he needed the Omega Key to access it once it was shut down with a firewall.

Megatron learned through a recording from Laserbeak that Autobot Leader Zeta Prime had the Omega Key in his possession and had holed up deep within Iacon. Megatron led a full-scale assault on the city, totally devastating Iacon, until he found Zeta Prime at last. After a hard battle, Zeta fell, and Megatron obtained the Omega Key. However, immediately upon taking it, alarms went off, and Iacon itself was shaking. Zeta Prime, despite being mortally wounded, laughed at Megatron's face, saying the Omega Key was only the key to the true key: the city-sized Autobot Omega Supreme.

Omega immediately attacked the victorious Decepticons, and quickly decimated their presence in Iacon, save for Megatron's team and a few others. By this point, Megatron was absolutely furious at Starscream: Megatron declared it was he who led them to Omega Supreme and the devastating onslaught he carried out. Starscream bitterly retorted even if Megatron killed him, Omega Supreme would still be out for his blood, helping nothing whatsoever. Megatron angrily let it go for the time being, and led his army to battle. His troops' confidence beginning to falter, Megatron declared they would either be kicking themselves for not acting for the rest of their lives, or heroes in a historic event. His men followed him to battle Omega, and the titan fell. Megatron was free to corrupt the Core of Cybertron with Dark Energon, and obtain near-supremacy of Cybertron.

That kind of went downhill when the new Autobot leader, Optimus Prime, extinguished the Dark Energon and destroyed Trypticon Space Station, didn't it? 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, fusion cannon

This toy is based on Megatron's appearance in the video game Transformers: War for Cybertron, transforming into a Cybertronian self-propelled gun. The treads of his vehicle can be positioned in either a vertical configuration like a traditional tank or in a horizontal, hovertank configuration. Megatron's spring-loaded cannon can attach to either arm. He also has an insignia on his back, but unlike Optimus, his is not hidden by kibble.

Some units of the figure have Megatron's left internal shoulder strut misassembled, preventing that side of the tank-mode from becoming properly flush to the body when transforming. This can be corrected by unscrewing and separating the outer shoulder structure, flipping the strut 180 degrees, and reassembling the shoulder covering.

Also, the packaging image for his tank mode is flipped.

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.
• Like the Movie version, this Megatron will retain an alien jet form as he despises human-created alternate modes. According to Cybertronian Megatron's packaging bio, Megatron often changes his altmode, probably in an attempt to explain why he's a tank in the game and a jet in the cartoon. He is also similar to his movie version because in the continuity, he turns into both a tank and a jet at some point.