Megatron (Generation One)

Megatron was a gladiator from Tarn, who sought to turn Cybertron into a cosmic dreadnaught. To win his war for conquest, Megatron's Decepticons developed the art of transformation.

As seen in The Transformers, the war grew so fierce that Cybertron was shaken from its orbit. A thousand years after the war had begun, the planet was headed for an asteroid field, Megatron and his troops followed the Ark, sent to clear a path through the dangerous area, and attacked the weakened Autobot crew once they had achieved their goal. However, Optimus Prime sent the ship crashing into Earth, knocking them all offline.

After reawakening on Earth in 1984, Megatron immediately set about trying to locate a source of fuel for the Decepticons. After having his troops construct a fortress out of a nuclear power plant, in Power Play, Megatron found that they were unable to withdraw usable fuel from it. Overhearing the Autobots' plan to have new ally Sparkplug Witwicky develop usable fuel out of Earth gasoline, Megatron's forces engaged the Autobots in a battle which ended in kidnapping the human. Back at their fortress in Prisoner of War, Megatron forced him to develop a conversion process. Megatron soon found his Decepticons and his base under siege by the Autobot Gears and the super-powered Spider-Man. Despite Spider-Man's webbing having no effect on him, the pair escaped with Sparkplug. The mechanic had already managed to convert Earth fuel into usable energy, and given them the means to implement this process.

After an argument with Megatron, in The Enemy Within, Starscream left their headquarters and planned to prove his superiority. Ravage, spying in Starscream as per Megatron's orders, was discovered, and Starscream tried to kill him. The enraged Megatron punished him with a Trial by Combat against the Autobot Brawn. In Raiders of the Last Ark, Megatron and the Decepticons laid siege to the Ark, but his attack was stopped by the Ark's faulty computer system, Auntie. Captured with Optimus Prime in a stasis field, Auntie's willingness to kill both sides led to the desperate Megatron to absorb antimatter from a black hole. After Ravage and Windcharger saved them, Megatron moved to use his cosmic power on Prime, until Windcharger magnetically launched him out of the Ark, with Megatron vowing to return.

At some point, as seen in Decepticon Dam-Busters, Soundwave devised a plan to create energy by overloading Sherman Dam with a tidal wave. The Autobots arrived to thwart the Decepticons and Megatron faced Optimus Prime in a one-on-one duel on top of the dam. When Prime was distracted by Hound, Megatron knocked him into the river below, then transformed into gun mode and destroyed the dam itself.

Fully fueled with Sparkplug's fuel, in The Last Stand, Megatron was able to laugh off a full-scale assault by the US Army. Starscream, however, continually attempted to undermine his leadership, and Megatron non fatally blasted him. With the Autobots lacking fuel and the Decepticons at full strength, Megatron led a assault on the Ark. The empowered Decepticons soon overcame the Ark's five remaining defenders; Megatron himself took down Optimus Prime, but collapsed, due to Sparkplug's fuel being poisoned.

After Shockwave defeated the Autobots, Megatron was put within a repair harness by him in The New Order. Megatron discovered that Shockwave had nominated himself to be the Decepticon leader, to his fury. In The Worse of Two Evils, Megatron broke free of his harness before repairs were completed, and duelled Shockwave. Megatron eventually lost the duel, and Shockwave refused him an honourable death. Megatron was eventually repaired, and in Warrior School, was assigned guard duty within the Ark, where he encountered Ratchet. Megatron's first impulse was to simply kill him, but Ratchet convinced him he had the means to rid him of Shockwave, thus Megatron allied with the medic.

In Repeat Performance, Ratchet located and reactivated the Dinobots, who had defeated Shockwave in the past. Shown videos of the Dinobots bringing down and defeating Shockwave, Megatron headed out to a rendezvous with Ratchet, but betrayed him. As soon as he announced his intention to kill Ratchet, the Autobot loosed the Dinobots on Megatron. Megatron quickly defeated them all, and challenged Ratchet to fight. To his surprise, Ratchet was willing to sacrifice himself to knock Megatron off a cliff. Ratchet's efforts caused the cliff to collapse, taking Megatron with it. He transformed to his smaller pistol mode in an attempt to survive the fall, and vanished.

Megatron was eventually found trapped in gun mode, with his higher brain functions damaged, by wannabe gangster Joey Slick in Shooting Star. Megatron let Slick use him as a weapon, with Slick gaining infamy as a crook, until he was restored after being thrown at the ground, the impact reconnecting his circuitry. Although willing to kill Slick for using him, Joey bravely accepted his fate, impressing Megatron, who let him live. By the time of I, Robot-Master, Megatron was desperately low on fuel and attacked a coal mine, finding coal to be unusable. He eventually ran out and shut down. He was located by Soundwave, who brought him back online, and they allied with the human Donny Finkleberg, who, under the alias "Robot-Master", conned humanity into thinking the Transformers worked for him.

In Second Generation, Megatron temporarily went into hiding, using Soundwave to spy on Shockwave as the Decepticons eavesdropped on Optimus Prime and Buster's Matrix vision of the Special Teams. Subsequently, he decided that it was time to retake command of the Decepticons and challenged Shockwave to a battle at the Wyoming base. When it became apparent that both combatants were too evenly matched, Soundwave interrupted them and they were convinced to put aside their differences for the time being.

In The Bridge to Nowhere, an argument between Megatron and Shockwave threatened to escalate into a stand off, until Straxus contacted them from Cybertron. This convinced them to share the position of leadership. During this period of joint leadership, in To a Power Unknown, the Decepticons rampaged through a human town when they were struck by a burst of energy. This temporarily reversed their personalities, making them compassionate. While the other Decepticons repaired the damage they caused, Megatron and Shockwave both insisted the other was more qualified to be the leader. Once the blast's effects wore off, the Decepticons tracked its origin to England. They headed overseas to retaliate for what they assumed to be an Autobot trick. Though Starscream found the device responsible, a human invention called the "PARD," it was destroyed before he could take off with it.

In Command Performances, Megatron led a team of Decepticons, expecting to meet a group of reinforcements through the space bridge, but found that they had been supplanted by an Autobot resistance cell instead. Preparing to attack them, Megatron was informed that Optimus Prime's Autobots were assaulting the Wyoming base, leaving the Ark undefended. Unable to resist the temptation to take it for himself, Megatron directed his troops there, only to be defeated by Omega Supreme. However, since Shockwave had allowed the Autobots to capture the secrets of Devastator, Megatron was able to spin the situation and reclaim his leadership.

Megatron and Shockwave's power struggle continued for sometime until Optimus Prime killed himself in a video game duel. Refusing to believe his nemesis was dead, Megatron committed suicide by blowing himself up on a space bridge. However, the explosion had merely deposited him in the Dead End region of Cybertron, where he wandered as an empty, with no recollection of who he was.

After regaining his memories, Megatron forced Ratchet to turn Starscream into a Pretender, but the ploy failed and the two were grotesquely fused in a trans-time dimensional portal explosion. Fixit separated their bodies but the two remained in stasis aboard the Ark. They reawoke when Galvatron, a future version of Megatron, attacked, and Ratchet crash landed the ship.

Generation 2

In one universe, Cobra rebuilt Megatron into a tank, and he allied with Optimus against Jhiaxus, his Cybertronians, and the Swarm.

Classics

In another, fifteen years of peace passed before Megatron rose again.

Regeneration One

In a third, he woke up in 1994, and proceeded to lay waste to the Earth, awaiting the day Optimus Prime would return.

Megatron is the main antagonist of the series. He was responsible for bringing Cybertron out of its Golden Age when he restarted the Autobot/Decepticon civil war nine million years ago. Among his first actions was the fatal wounding of a young dock worker named Orion Pax, who was rebuilt to become Megatron's mortal enemy, Optimus Prime.

Megatron's forces boarded the Autobots' spacecraft when it was on a mission to search for new sources of energy on other planets, and was knocked offline like all the other Transformers when the craft crashed on prehistoric Earth. When both factions reawakened in 1984, Megatron made it his mission to pillage all of Earth's natural resources and enslave its populace, with the goal of revitalizing Cybertron and dominating the entire universe. 

His plans were by turns cunning, wicked, outrageous, and often, utterly, utterly ludicrous.

The Transformers: The Movie

“	Ah! No! No! I accept your terms, I accept!	„
	~ Megatron's last words in The Transformers: The Movie, before he is reformatted into Galvatron by Unicron.

Megatron is the secondary antagonist of the film. Taking several years after the cartoon in 2005, Megatron wages a full-scale, geniusly orchestrated assault on Autobot City, crippling the Autobot's ranks and killing several high ranking warriors. When Optimus Prime arrived to the battle, he gunned down almost every Decepticon singlehandedly before taking on Megatron himself. Though Optimus got the upper-hand and was readying to execute his nemesis, a young Autobot named Hot Rod jumped in the way when he noticed Megatron was reaching for a firearm. Megatron managed to incapacitate Hot Rod and mortally wound Optimus before the latter punched the Decepticon commander off the peak of Autobot City. Prime later died from his wounds after passing the Matrix of Leadership to Ultra Magnus. Soundwave recovered his fallen leader when the Decepticons began to retreat, but Starscream eventually threw Megatron's wounded body into space to rust along with several other wounded Deceptions before taking his place as the Decepticon leader. Floating in the voids of space, Megatron was summoned by the omnicidal chaos god Unicron where the former was forced to become the latter's apprentice and enforcer. In return, Unicron gave Megatron a new body and titled him as Galvatron.