30 years of Kirby: HAL, experimentation, and Kirby

HAL might mostly focus on Kirby games these days, but Kirby games can be anything.

August 1, 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the North American debut of Kirby. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Kirby’s games, creating rankings, and thinking about the past and future of the series. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

HAL Laboratory used to make other games besides just Kirby. They still do — hello, BoxBoy! and Part Time UFO — but this was the case more so in their now-distant past. This doesn’t mean that HAL only makes one kind of game, however. Kirby simply became a mascot, one existing within an ever-growing world, as part of an ever-growing cast, and has appeared in so many games — and so many different kinds of games — that even the likes of Mario have to be wondering if there is more they could be doing. Kirby really is the dream of Shigeru Miyamoto’s anything you need him to be protagonist, Jumpman, realized a second time.

There are Kirby spinoffs, there are Kirby sub-games, there are Kirby mini-games. Even the mainline Kirby games aren’t necessarily all cut from the same adorable pink cloth. HAL has always been all over the place, genre-wise, and while the number of franchises they worked on shrunk with the success of Kirby, this experimentation and genre-hopping only grew.

The spinoffs and experimentation began almost immediately. Kirby’s Dream Land was a relatively straightforward affair — a platformer with some new mechanics, but a platformer nonetheless — but its followup, late-life NES classic Kirby’s Adventure, changed the formula of Kirby forever by adding the copy powers the series is known for. Why just inhale enemies to use them as projectile weapons, when you can become those enemies instead? This change opened up new avenues for level design, for environmental puzzles, for how people would even play through Kirby’s games, and while it seems pretty standard now, it’s also 29 years after the concept was introduced: we’ve had time to become accustomed to it. What a wild change to make, though, after the smash success of Dream Land, to upend its premise so immediately and decisively.

Image credit: Nintendo

Even with the early successes (Adventure sold 1.75 million copies despite it being an NES game releasing 2.5 years after the SNES debuted in Japan), there wouldn’t be a new Kirby platformer for the Game Boy for two years, and a second home console platformer for three — and that one would release toward the end of the Super Nintendo’s life cycle, though a little less egregiously than Kirby’s Adventure with the NES’ own. There would be plenty of Kirby games in that three-year stretch, however: 1993 also featured Game Boy title Kirby’s Pinball Land, and the first SNES Kirby was 1994’s Dream Course. It should be pretty easy to figure out what genre Pinball Land is in, and while it was the first such Kirby title, it was HAL’s third pinball release, after Rollerball and Revenge of the ‘Gator. And to be fair, they didn’t simply slap Kirby onto a pinball game: it looks and feels and sounds like a Kirby game, just one where the thing you are doing is playing pinball instead of platforming.

That’s also the secret to Dream Course’s success as a mini golf game: it is mini golf, and it is especially video game mini golf, but there is also a built-in understanding of how its wild-for-the-sport universe works, since there should be built-in familiarity with Kirby for the player. A mini golf game where Kirby is the ball could be fun, but a mini golf game where Kirby is the ball and is capable of using copy abilities to cut down on the number of strokes it takes to complete a course, while avoiding obstacles trying to harm him just as they would in a platformer? Now that’s how you make one of the best games in a 30-year-old franchise. You could hem and haw about branding a mini golf game with a known property instead of just making a new one to stand on its own — the Compile-developed Kirby’s Avalanche, for instance, is Puyo Puyo with some Kirby trappings, but that’s not what Dream Course is: that was HAL using the most alluring palette at their disposal, to paint the richest tapestry with it that they could.

Kirby’s Dream Land 2 would release in 1995, and, in addition to bringing copy powers to Nintendo’s portable system, also introduced Kirby’s animal friends: Kine the sunfish, Coo the owl, and, of course, Rick the hamster. They each had their own power — Rick allowed Kirby to run faster, Kine made swimming a breeze, and Coo let Kirby inhale enemies and objects while flying, as well as an ability to push past strong winds. The roster of friends and their powers would grow in time for Kirby’s Dream Land 3, as well: maybe the unoriginal idea for a ridable pal stemmed from Mario’s success with Yoshi, but HAL went beyond the various Yoshi abilities in a hurry. Kirby’s Block Ball would follow this, also on the Game Boy, and the strength of this is that it was a Kirby game that used paddles, and not simply a genre clone featuring Kirby. It’s a Breakout/Arkanoid-style title for sure, but there is so much Kirby in here that it feels like a necessary outgrowth of the genre: there are four paddles in Block Ball, not just one, and the ball in question is a controllable Kirby who is capable of using different copy abilities that change the way you play.

Kirby Super Star would release in 1996 and mark the pink one’s platformer debut on the SNES, but even this wasn’t a straightforward affair. It’s basically a Kirby anthology game, eight smaller titles in one, and as I’ve written before, it let HAL do what they do best: bounce around between ideas at will. You might think a bunch of smaller games put into one game is unambitious, but Super Star was the opposite. A bunch of bite-sized platformers, all with different playstyle hooks, and HAL’s first meaningful attempt at building sub-games and bonus modes that are fascinating explorations of games on their own. Plus, co-op that let you control which copy ability you would use, as well as a partner player, be they human or game-controlled.

Kirby rarely, if ever, stands still. HAL is almost always pushing the little guy forward, changing things up from one game to the next, which is why the moments where they don’t do that stand out so much. Part of the reason the first 3DS outing in the series, Triple Deluxe, wasn’t exciting enough is because it didn’t do nearly enough different from some preexisting Kirby titles, and middle DS child Squeak Squad, while not developed solely by HAL, caught a lot of flak for mostly being more of the Kirby we already knew. People came to expect that there would always be some new hook, some new wrinkle, or maybe some genre getting its first Kirby treatment, so when something was more of the same — even if it was technically competent and enjoyable — it tended to do poorly with critics and even audiences.

Luckily, there is more of the experimental spirit of the 90s in HAL’s decades-spanning history with Kirby than not. Kirby’s Dream Land 3 took the series’ music in its next direction while building on past gameplay rather than simply aping it, and completely re-imagined what Kirby had to look like, too. Star Stacker and Super Star Stacker were original puzzle games, not just a decision to use Kirby for a North American port of an existing property. Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble is entirely motion controlled, something of a cross between pinball and a Super Monkey Ball franchise that didn’t exist yet: you roll Kirby around by tilting your Game Boy Color system, and the narrative reason for this is simply that Kirby is very tired from all of his adventures and goings on, and won’t move around otherwise.

Air Ride is a racing game, that, like Masahiro Sakurai’s original intent for Kirby, was designed to be easy to pick up and play — you only need to control the vehicle’s direction with the control stick, and press A for literally anything else — but with complexity there to find for those in need of it. Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, another one where HAL shared development duties with Flagship, was Metroidvania-esque, and featured up to four cooperative players. Canvas Curse, like with Tilt ‘n’ Tumble, took away Kirby’s limbs in order to make him a rolling ball. The difference here, though, is that this was a sidescrolling game, unlike the top-down Game Boy Color title, and as it was on the DS, it was controlled with the stylus. You would draw paths for Kirby, and navigate caverns, buildings, and larger open spaces along the way, all full of secrets. The concept would be revisited in 2015’s Wii U title Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, but even here in a second go of things, the game was designed differently, with more emphasis on enemies, larger and more varied stages, cooperative mode with up to three other players who will have their own challenges to consider in order to re-balance the difficulty, and a modeling clay style of art.

The brilliant Mass Attack put you in control of up to 10 smaller Kirbys at once, forcing familiar enemies to wonder if they would rather take on one regular-sized Kirby or 10 very persistent tiny ones. Return to Dream Land was something of a return to the traditional for the series, but unlike with Squeak Squad, there was still plenty of new here, between new gameplay elements and co-op that allowed King Dedede and Meta Knight to enter the fray alongside their former rival. Planet Robobot was a standout on the 3DS in a way Triple Deluxe wasn’t, because of how it brought setting, narrative, and gameplay together for “Kirby Rides a Mech Now: The Game.” And the past decade has been spent creating elaborate platforming puzzles that require four characters and specific powers to solve in Kirby Star Allies, transitioning Kirby fully to 3D for the first time in the incredible Forgotten Land, and coming out with digital release after digital release in non-platforming genres that focus on a range from cooperative boss fights with role-playing game elements, to rhythm titles, to score-attack action games, to HAL deciding that even if Smash Bros. wasn’t their series to make anymore, they could still make multiplayer fighters. Again, the non-Kirby games have slowed down over the years, but the genres HAL bothers with certainly have not.

And this is without getting too far into their list of sub-games, which has a deep enough roster at this point that I could rank the 30 best of them on a list that actually has quite a few more than that. Platforming racers, shoot-em-ups, more pinball, shooting galleries, simple RPGs, Simon, games designed to test your reaction time and attention to detail, games designed to let you flex your button-pressing speed, games designed on old arcade games — and I don’t mean arcade games with monitors… HAL has basically done it all at this point, and nearly all of it featured Kirby.

Maybe a non-platformer as meaty as Dream Course isn’t in the cards any longer, not in a world where smaller digital bites can be put on the menu, but that’s perfectly fine, too. A lower barrier to entry means more room to experiment, to see if HAL can put a twist on an existing genre that makes it worth revisiting or praising, or to create something entirely new, and entirely HAL. Regardless of which, Kirby is likely to be there: we’re 30 years into that strategy, one where “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” somehow simultaneously applies and does not apply at all.

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