30 years of Kirby: Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble

A spin-off, or just seemingly ahead of its time in how it treated Kirby's movement differently than we were used to?

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.

Is Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble a spin-off? That probably depends on who you ask, or what source you read. The Game Boy Color title surely seemed like a spin-off back in 2000 when it released in Japan, and in 2001 in North America. As it featured motion controls to move the pink one around, it didn’t play like any Kirby game had to that point, and anything with movement this off the path from the norm had been a spin-off to that point: think Kirby’s Block Ball, Pinball Land, and Dream Course.

However, as Kirby’s mainline games started to change how movement worked, Tilt ‘n’ Tumble began to feel more like a signal of change leading to that decision rather than as one of the titled you previously could have grouped it with. What, exactly, is the difference between Tilt ‘n’ Tumble’s motion controls, where Kirby’s ball form is in focus, and Canvas Curse or Rainbow Curse, where a stylus is used to propel a limbless Kirby along? What separates it from Epic Yarn, where Kirby starred as a pliable length of yarn, traversing the environment in a number of unfamiliar forms and without the use of copy abilities? Or the touch-based Mass Attack, where 10 smaller Kirbys make their way through levels in yet another unfamiliar manner?

I didn’t rank Tilt ‘n’ Tumble with the other Kirby spin-offs, because it feels more like a mainline game than anything at this stage. And while it might not stand as one of the finer Kirby efforts, it’s still an important game for the direction it helped signal for both future Kirby games and Nintendo itself.

Image credit: MobyGames

Kirby's Pinball Land is a pinball game with elements of Kirby’s more standard games in it, that help elevate it beyond “just” a pinball game starring a popular mascot. Tilt 'n' Tumble is a Kirby game set in a pinball-like game. it’s not straight pinball, however, not even close, as there is also kind of a Marble Madness thing going on, just without the isometric/3D-ish environments that arcade classic was known for. The obstacles, the search for shortcuts, the separate paths, the short time to make it all come together? That’s all Marble Madness-eseque, however. It’s also not exactly like Marble Madness either, however, as that game used a trackball in arcades, and controllers at home: Tilt ‘n’ Tumble used motion controls to tilt the environment Kirby was in, causing him to tumble.

That’s a bit more like Super Monkey Ball, which features a variety of monkeys within balls navigating free-floating courses in an attempt to reach the goal without falling, with the level manipulated around them to cause them to reach their destination as quickly and as unscathed as possible. Tilt ‘n’ Tumble predated Sega’s arcade release of Super Monkey Ball by a year, however: the North American launch of Tilt ‘n’ Tumble lined up pretty closely with Super Monkey Ball, as they were both spring 2001, but the Japanese release of Tilt ‘n’ Tumble occurred in August of 2000, 10 months prior to the debut of what was then just Monkey Ball, and 15 months ahead of the console version of the game. Super Monkey Ball also still used traditional controls, and a third-person perspective, unlike the top-down, motion-controlled Kirby outing.

Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble wasn’t originally going to be a Kirby game at all. According to Kazuhiko Taniguchi, a producer at Nintendo R&D2 at the time, development began in April of 1999, and per the director of R&D2, Toshiaku Suzuki, it was going to feature — wait for it — a monkey, and be called “Koro Monkey.” One wonders what Sega and Toshihiro Nagoshi would have done with their own developing franchise had Nintendo followed through with the monkey rolling around an obstacle course idea.

R&D2 felt the game needed to be a bit more “character oriented,” so when their substitute ideas for the monkey didn’t catch on, either, and Shigeru Miyamoto suggested Kirby as the perfect character for rolling around, everything changed. HAL Laboratory joined Nintendo R&D2 to jointly develop what was now a Kirby game, that would combine the love of experimentation of HAL with Nintendo’s obsession over making motion controls happen.

Yes, it was still just 1999, years before the Nintendo Wii would stun the gaming world, but Nintendo’s focus on motion controls weren’t even new at that point, either. The Power Pad and Power Glove both utilized player motion to control games way back on the NES, and while the Wii ended up being the first Nintendo console based around this idea of using motion, they wanted it to occur in specific games well before then. Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble features an accelerometer in the cartridge itself, and it would not be the only Nintendo game where this was the case: WarioWare: Twisted! released for the Game Boy Advance in 2004, and is the actual genesis point of motion in WarioWare games — not its eventual Wii entry, and not its 3DS, built-in-accelerometer releases, either. Yoshi’s Universal Gravitation is another GBA title from 2004 with motion sensors built into the cartridge, and predating both of these was the Japan-only Koro Koro Puzzle Happy Panechu! from 2002, which is the first GBA title with this kind of technology within it.

Nintendo began considering what their next console would be immediately after releasing the GameCube in 2001, and it’s pretty easy to draw a direct line between the development of Tilt ‘n’ Tumble and said successor, the Wii, with these other games coming in between. And it all started with a little monkey, and R&D2 not being sure they had the right character after all.

The one real downside to this focus on motion is that replicating Tilt ‘n’ Tumble (and games like it) has not been the easiest thing to manage. The 3DS, as said, has a built-in accelerometer, so it probably could have done it, but the clamshell design probably would have made that a little weird, too, given you had to hold your Game Boy Color completely flat in order for the titling to do what you wanted it to in Kirby’s outing. It could have been done — and should have been done — but it’s at least easy to see why Nintendo didn’t bother replicating Tilt ‘n’ Tumble on the 3DS, given the work and recalibration involving in putting it on the Virtual Console would have been much more significant than the emulation of other titles from the same system. And GBA emulation on the 3DS was limited to just the free giveaway games for early adopters — they lack the basic features of the actual Virtual Console games, so fairly or not, WarioWare: Twisted! et al were never a possibility.

It could still happen on the Switch, which also uses accelerometers in its Joy Cons and Pro Controllers for motion, and does so quite well. It might actually work better there than on the Game Boy Color, given you could hold the controllers level and tilt as needed, flicking when you have to, and the images on screen would remain viewable with ease if you have the system docked or undocked, but on its stand: flicking your Game Boy Color to get Kirby to hop over something was an understandable design decision, but also a huge pain in the ass for a small screen that wasn’t backlit that you were basically hunched over in order to keep it level otherwise.

Even in the moment, Nintendo was aware of this problem: there was originally going to be a sequel on the GameCube, which you would play with a Game Boy Advance connected via Link Cable — that would have freed up the screen from motion, leaving it entirely in your hands, and allowing for superior viewing like what was described above. The project, like quite a few potential Kirby games of the era, was canceled, though, and unlike with what would become Return to Dream Land on the Wii, hasn’t been revisited, either. It was officially announced and showed off by Nintendo, however, so footage does exist:

Anyway, enough of that kind of history. What does the Tilt ‘n’ Tumble that actually exists play like? I like to think Kirby is simply too tired from all of his adventuring, so he needs you to manipulate the environment around him to help him see what King Dedede is up to. I even convinced myself this was canon at some point, and am only wavering on that now because I can’t find a corroborating source.

Regardless of the why, Kirby travels through a free-floating environment full of bumpers, holes, places to jump, clouds to latch on to, obstacles and enemies to avoid, and he has to traverse it all through your tilts and the occasional button press to launch from a cloud or cannon. Time is of the essence: you do not get much of it, and you need to make sure to spend time collecting clocks to grant you bonus seconds, or completing checkpoint objectives to gain significant boosts to your remaining time. Enemies do not grant copy abilities, and touching them will damage Kirby, who does have a life gauge and a limited number of lives. You damage foes by flicking your Game Boy Color — this creates a bit of an area of effect radius, which defeats foes and converts them into collectible stars. There are checkpoints in the stages, and a game over will result in you going back to the beginning of the stage, score reset. Continues are unlimited, though, so you can power through what is a surprisingly difficult Kirby experience if you have to — all that tilting on floating islands means you have many, many opportunities to fall to your doom, including in boss fights.

There are eight worlds in total, with four stages within each. Plus sub-games you get your pick of if you find the hidden Blue Star in each stage — Do the Kirby, which is a memory game where you need to repeat the progressively lengthier and more complicated dance Kirby is doing again and again until you fail too many times, is the highlight of the bunch — and bonus games to play to try to earn more 1-ups if you find the hidden warp stars, too. There’s quite a bit here, given the difficulty of it all: you’re not going to plow through Tilt ‘n’ Tumble like you might other Kirby titles, given how it’s a bit less predictable with its motion controls and penchant for instant death. You can help yourself out by collecting as many red stars as possible: standard stars accumulate like coins in Mario, except you only need 50 rather than 100 for an extra life, and after five red stars, each one you find is its own 1-up, though, the counter resets within a given stage whenever you die.

Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble is fun, but occasionally frustrating given the limitations of the hardware — seriously, flicking your non-backlit screen can be a real downer when it doesn’t work out for you as intended. It’s kind of a lost game in many ways, despite being popular at the time: the more traditional platformer Kirby 64 sold 1.77 million copies one year prior, while its peer, Tilt ‘n’ Tumble, still managed 1.23 million. Which put it in line with successful mainline games of the day (2004’s Amazing Mirror would sell 1.47 million on the GBA, 1996’s Super Star had sold 1.44 million on the SNES) as well as the spin-offs it was originally considered to be part of (Air Ride’s sales totaled 1.34 million, only Pinball Land managed more sales among Game Boy-family spin-offs). It didn’t do well enough to guarantee a direct sequel, but it was at least convincing enough for Nintendo to continue to go down this motion-controlled road.

Which makes Tilt ‘n’ Tumble a more important game than it is a good one, but it is good: it’s just a bit frustrating, as said, in ways Kirby games don’t tend to be. That’s bound to happen when developers are trying new things, though, and for whatever negative things you might be able to say about Tilt ‘n’ Tumble, you certainly can’t say it lacked originality. Now, if Nintendo would only get working on putting it on a system where all of those deficiencies could be addressed, instead of leaving it in this weird, hard-to-find limbo it currently resides in that caused me to buy my own copy from Japan since it was one-fifth the price of North American cartridges.

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