Megatron's History
Megatron (aka Galvatron, N.B.E.-01, the Ice Man and C-81) was not always the viciously powerful and brutally direct leader of the Decepticons: he was once brothers-in-arms with Optimus and a student of Sentinel Prime, appointed to be Cybertron's Protector and commander of its Defense Force. But Megatron resented his comrade, knowing he was a Prime and therefore Sentinel's favored son. This anger allowed The Fallen to ensnare him and led to the revival of the Decepticons. Even without The Fallen, it's not hard to imagine that Megatron would have erupted Cybertron into war to rid himself of Optimus.
Megatron tends to become so obsessed with the object of his desires that he can ignore "secondary" matters, glaring flaws in his plans. Otherwise, he likely wouldn't have chased after the AllSpark alone, and spent centuries entombed in the Arctic. Trying to talk Megatron out of blindly going for his goals is useless. He will risk his world, his troops, and even his own spark to achieve his goals; these things do not matter to Megatron. Like his master, Megatron feels a violent hatred towards humans and views them as only slightly above bacteria, a feeling exacerbated by spending decades as their prisoner.
Despite this fatal flaw, Megatron did not achieve his dreaded status through simple warmongering. He's a manipulative, cunning strategist who can plan multiple schemes spanning millennia, and while they may overlap, they all help him towards his one, true goal: the restoration of Cybertron. For all his evils, Megatron genuinely strives to save his home planet some day, and with it, the Cybertronian race: even if it means he has to rule it with his iron fist and put his bloodlust to good use to do so.
Megatron eventually succeeded in tracking the AllSpark to Earth, where he rather embarrassingly crash-landed in the Arctic Circle and was frozen solid for thousands of years. In 1897, some 100 Earth-years before the arrival of the other Transformers, he was discovered by an explorer named Archibald Amundsen Witwicky. Captain Witwicky accidentally activated Megatron's navigation system and caused the coordinates of the AllSpark to be etched onto the explorer's glasses. Megatron remained imprisoned in the Arctic until the 1930s, when he was dug out by the United States government and moved to a secret Sector Seven stronghold inside Hoover Dam. In the years that followed, many modern devices (by Earth standards) were reverse-engineered from his frozen body.
In the present day, having searched the galaxy for the AllSpark and being drawn to Earth, the remaining Decepticons learned of Witwicky's glasses. Through the Internet, they determined the location of both Megatron and the AllSpark inside Hoover Dam. Frenzy infiltrated the dam and shut down the power systems, while Starscream attacked the external powerlines, resulting in Megatron's thawing out. Once again online, the leader of the Decepticons informed the worthless insects of his true name, shouting "I am Megatron!" (to clear up all that N.B.E.-01/Ice Man nonsense), randomly killed a few of them while destroying his former prison, then transformed and flew off after the AllSpark again. He met up with Starscream for the first time in thousands of years on the outside, and, never one for pleasantries, immediately demanded to know where the Cube was. Upon learning that the humans had moved the AllSpark, Megatron berated.
