30 years of Kirby: Kirby's Adventure

Kirby's console debut has a history worth exploring, as does its later portable remake.

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.

Kirby in its most basic form isn’t actually found in the first game in the series from 1992, Dream Land. Dream Land is basic, yes, and I don’t mean that as an insult, but it released before the actual essence of what Kirby even is had come to be. There are no copy powers in Kirby’s Dream Land — it predates the thing that made Kirby stand out from its platforming competition more than anything else, before the central concept that shaped the other concepts heaped on top of it in the decades that would follow existed. Kirby’s Adventure, the console debut of the now-in-color pink puffball, would be where copy abilities were introduced, and to this day remains an excellent entry point for the series, even if it’s since been exceeded quite a few times in quality.

That last sentence has more to do with the games that would follow than with Adventure, which remains as enjoyable of a use of an afternoon as it did 29 years ago when it graced the NES a decade into its lifespan. (While the NES didn’t release in North America until the fall of 1985, the Japanese Famicom hit shelves in the summer of ‘83 — Kirby’s Adventure would release a few months shy of the Famicom’s 10th birthday.)

Why was Kirby’s Adventure released on the ancient-for-tech NES, rather than its successor, the SNES, which had already been on the market in Japan for nearly three years at that point, and in North America for just under two? Some of it likely has to do with install base differences and HAL’s still-recent business troubles at that point. The NES might have been old, but it had life in it yet, and it’s not as if HAL were alone in still developing for the platform. The NES sold around 62 million consoles in its lifetime, and the SNES wouldn’t crack 50 million in its own existence: through 1992, a little over 16 million Super Famicom and Super Nintendo systems had been sold worldwide. Kirby’s Adventure released in the spring of 1993, and while business would pick up for the SNES around then, while development of Adventure was ongoing, the SNES’ sales superiority was still very much in question, as it was basically in a dead heat worldwide with the Sega Genesis, and at least in Japan, the PC Engine was a legitimate rival and alternative.

Image credit: MobyGames

Plenty of developers pushed onward to the SNES, anyway, but HAL was (and still is) a company obsessed with wringing more out of technology than is expected from it, and as said, were just coming out of their bankruptcy scare. Satoru Iwata, president of HAL at this point for a couple of years now, mentioned the success of games like Kirby’s Adventure moving them off of some “unreasonable” development choices and helping change the attitude around the office (translation courtesy Shmuplations):

We were right on the verge of bankruptcy when I turned to everyone at HAL and said, “Ok, from here on out, every game we create is going to sell a million copies!” I think everyone thought, “he’s lost his mind.” (laughs) But after that we released Kirby’s Adventure, and then Kirby’s Dream Course and Mother 2 (Earthbound) on the SFC. Thanks to those successes, everyone’s attitude changed, and they started saying things during development like, “if we don’t change this it won’t sell a million copies!” Their initial response though was more like, this is impossible—but what else can we do? The Kirby’s Adventure development stands out as the most “unreasonable” in that sense.

So, with this goal of million sellers fresh on the minds of everyone at HAL, going to the NES — a system HAL was infinitely more familiar with at this point than the relatively newer SNES — for Kirby’s console debut made a lot of sense. Development would be less expensive, HAL would be able to show off all they had learned about developing for the NES in its long life, and the potential audience was significantly larger, too.

Kirby’s Adventure ended up selling 1.75 million copies — would it have done that on the SNES? It’s difficult to know for sure. Kirby’s Dream Course sold fewer than 600,000 copies on the SNES a year later, but it was also a mini golf game. Kirby Super Star sold 1.44 million copies, but did so in 1996, a couple of months before the Nintendo 64 release in Japan and, internationally, nine days before the system’s North American release. The install base was there as it hadn’t been three years prior, but it was also something of a swan song for Kirby on the system. Well, until Kirby’s Dream Land 3 also released on the SNES a year later, and while it doesn’t appear that there is comprehensive sales data for that game, just 76,000 copies of Kirby’s final platformer on the system were reported sold in Japan, where the Super Famicom lived on a lot more successfully and for longer than in North America post-N64.

The important thing here is that Kirby’s Adventure really is a stunning success, in terms of it even existing on the NES in the first place. Consider what Super Mario Bros. 3, the pinnacle of the series on the system, looked like in 1988:

Image credit: Gamespot

Super Mario Bros. 3 isn’t ugly by any means, but it was as restricted by the hardware as basically anything else on the NES, and looks the part. Backgrounds were often solid colors with the occasional cloud or object in them, to limit most of what you would see to the foreground, strictly to objects Mario and Luigi would interact with. The game’s color scheme, for all the attempts at brightness found throughout, has always been a bit dark, which is most noticeable here in Mario’s outfit and the question mark blocks, as well as the extremely solid shadows and HUD. And the sound suffered in the same way sound almost always did on the NES, with music and sound effects often clashing with one another because the audio hardware had a difficult time running both simultaneously.

There’s a vibrancy to Kirby’s Adventure color scheme, sound, and general aesthetic that simply does not exist in most NES titles. Here’s an image from Adventure’s own 1-1 stage to show what I mean:

Look at the little details on Kirby, like making his cheeks appear flush. Look at the much larger details, like the water in the background that here is static, but is actually designed to appear as if it’s a living, breathing river with a current while playing. There is not only a cloud out there, but a less horrifying blue sky than Super Mario Bros. 3 possessed, hills in the background and smaller hills in an even further background, as well as objects in the foreground. There is the grass Kirby is stepping on, as well as additional greenery behind him, and the grass itself isn’t simply a solid block of green: it has its own layer of greenery in front of it, as well as an actual design to the grass itself. It’s all softer, less harsh than games like Super Mario Bros. 3, and extremely detailed in ways they were not, to boot. And that design extends to Kirby’s own animations and facial expressions, which, given the array of copy abilities and the ever-changing art found within the game’s information bar at the bottom of the screen, were plentiful.

The design here was implemented to look much more like the far more vibrant Super Mario World on the SNES, in terms of background usage and quality, than something that appears on the NES. But it’s an NES game, one HAL stuffed to the gills with design elements other developers would have either scoffed at including or wouldn’t have known how to. HAL knew how, though, and they knew they could pull it off, too. Iwata famously said that “A programmer must never say, ‘I can’t do that,’” which ended up being something he had to clarify again and again for years after, in interviews, with this quote coming from the previously linked Iwata interview:

I meant to say that a programmer should not be dismissive when he says he can’t do something. Most of the time there’s a solution to be found if you slow down and think about it. Of course, there are also ideas that really are impossible.

But the moment a programmer says “I can’t”, that idea dies. That’s why I say, if you’re going to tell someone something isn’t possible, instead of just saying “I can’t”, say “if we do this, we could do it” or “if we can get further with x, it would be possible.” I think that’s a principle that applies equally to any work, actually. The people who actually think up the ideas for games—designers—often don’t understand programming very well, and it can be easy for programmers to use “we can’t do that” as a convenient excuse.

1984’s F1 Race, which HAL developed for Nintendo in the years before the former was part of the latter, needed raster scrolling to work the way HAL envisioned it to, but that technique was not something the Famicom could just do. So, Iwata and HAL figured out how to make it do that, anyway, through their programming of the game itself. Metal Slader Glory never should have existed on the Famicom, given its technical limitations, but HAL figured it out. Kirby’s Adventure probably seemed like an impossibility to many NES developers, but not to HAL, who took Iwata’s principle of not saying “I can’t” to heart, and instead focused on figuring out if there was a solution to be found that simply had not been discovered yet. And hey, no one nearly bankrupted the company this time around, either!

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The copy abilities are still in a pretty basic form, far from what they’d become, but they are here and work, which is what matters. And why they stuck around, too, and began to influence Kirby in both platforming and non-platforming capacities. Each copy ability has just the one move, which resulted in some things like there being two different fire abilities: one for blowing flames from Kirby’s mouth, and another for propelling Kirby forward as a fireball. These would be combined into a single copy ability for Kirby Super Star, which used the fireball as a dash move and the exhalation of flames for a basic attack while standing in place. Some have secondary effects, like the parasol, which works as a melee weapon, yes, but also allowed Kirby to float around through the air in a different way than if he wasn’t carrying one around.

There were more copy abilities planned — Iwata said they had 40 copy abilities sketched out, but cut that down to the best of them in the end — but they had to be abandoned, because even HAL has their limits for shoving content into an NES game cartridge. At least one of those reemerged later on in some form, though, in Nintendo DS title Kirby: Squeak Squad: “Animal” would have allowed Kirby to bite and claw at foes, and that shares a name with a Squeak Squad’s own Animal ability, which dressed Kirby up in an adorable animal suit and allowed him to dig through soft dirt with powerful claws that also worked as an attack against enemies. It would be nice if we had a list of how many of these ended up existing over time, but sadly, not a lot of details have been given on what these abandoned abilities actually were, as far as I can see.

Unlike Dream Land, which featured just a handful of stages and took 20-30 minutes to play a loop of, Kirby’s Adventure used a world-level model with a stage select. The levels are pretty short, especially early on, but that wasn’t exactly rare for NES releases, and part of the joy of Adventure came from replaying the levels and having them play differently the next time because you were utilizing a different copy ability than before, so short wasn’t much of a problem even without that context of it being the style of the time. There was also the introduction of sub-games to the series, from the in-story crane game that nets you extra lives, to the reflex test that is Egg Catcher, to the first instance of a boss rush mode in a Kirby title: V.S. Boss!, which unlocks after completing the game the first time, and must be completed without the use of recovery items in between fights.

Between the more detailed design elements, the introduction of copy abilities, and the start of what would become more and more complex sub-games and side modes, Kirby’s Adventure really is the start of Kirby as we came to know the series, even if it’s not the first game in that series.

Kirby’s Adventure would be remade for the Game Boy Advance fairly early on in its lifespan, and would be renamed Kirby’s Nightmare in Dream Land. The game tweaked bosses so they would be more difficult, but due to increases in Kirby’s walking speed and his ability to both absorb and inflict damage, the game, overall, is a little easier than it was in its original form. Which suited Masahiro Sakurai, the director of Adventure and for Nightmare in Dream Land, just fine.

Whereas Kirby’s Adventure showed off all HAL knew about developing for the long-running NES, Nightmare in Dream Land was about showing off what the 32-bit Game Boy Advance could manage even in its youth. People sometimes think that the GBA is like a portable SNES, but it’s a more powerful system than that was: yes, it spent a lot of time in sprite-heavy 2D, but it’s not the GBA’s fault that the console-centric 32-bit generation was obsessed with trying to make 3D happen when there was perfectly beautiful, highly detailed, and impressively animated 2D spritework to be done, changing people’s idea of just what it was that level of horsepower was good for. Which is also part of why HAL didn’t want to just port over one of the SNES titles to the GBA, according to Sakurai: “That approach would have pleased a certain subset of the fanbase, but they're older games, and I wasn't sure their graphic style would fit players' expectations today. A straight port might provide some momentary satisfaction, but long-term I think it would be seen as somewhat stale…”

Instead, Adventure was chosen to be remade, not ported like so many other NES titles. Adventure was a beautiful NES game, and Nightmare in Dream Land is a beautiful GBA title, with impressive sprite work and animation that would have been difficult to achieve on the SNES, even for a developer as experienced and talented as HAL. Unlike with Sakurai’s Adventure, as well as Dream Land 2 and 3 and Crystal Shards, which were all directed by Shinichi Shimomura, Kirby is wearing different outfits in Nightmare in Dream Land, dependent on which copy ability he possesses. Even leaving aside his different looks for each of the game’s powers, there are “about” 120 different Kirby sprites in Nightmare in Dream Land, all of which feature in the game’s intro:

Really, that intro just shows off another strength of the GBA over past Nintendo consoles: HAL was exceptional at figuring out solutions to technical problems, yeah, but they weren’t about to make 120 Kirbys rushing across the screen work on the NES.

Nightmare in Dream Land also isn’t just a prettied up, more modern version of the original game, which is what the 3D Classics version of Kirby’s Adventure found on the Nintendo 3DS is — that was just Kirby’s Adventure basically as it was, minus some slowdown from the original, plus stereoscopic 3D and a cross-button control setup the NES wasn’t capable of providing with its A/B face-button setup. Nightmare in Dream Land, though, added some brand new sub-games into the mix, two of which made it into my top 30 rankings of those titles at Paste: Bomb Rally, which is like Link battling Ganondorf by returning magical “serves” except four player and with bombs, and Air Grind, which is a four-player race wherein you grind on a rail and avoid obstacles.

Most impressive, though, is the four-player co-op, which to that point had not been done in a platformer before. Nightmare in Dream Land’s co-op predates New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s by over seven years! Granted, all four players could play New Super Mario Bros. Wii on one system using four controllers, and for the full four-player co-op experience in Nightmare, you needed four different GBA systems and link cables to make it work, but that it exists at all is the point here. And it would go on to influence the next GBA Kirby title, as well, Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. HAL’s developers, at the time of Nightmare’s release, discussed how working “within the constraints of the original Famicom game” made the four-player mode difficult, but Amazing Mirror was built from the ground up, and brand new. The co-op even showed some of its features while playing solo, as all four Kirbys were always around, and could be summoned even if just the AI was controlling them instead of another player.

Even more was planned for Nightmare in Dream Land, per the developers themselves, but not all of it made sense for a remake, or there wasn’t time for it. Another 500 kilobytes of assets that were developed for the title never made it in there, which isn’t rare for game development, by any means, but I mention it here because Kirby’s Dream Land, in its entirety, was around 500KB. Game development really does change over time, the constraints different than what they once were, and the progression of Kirby from his first to his second game, and then to that title’s remake, is a more than sufficient example of that.

Kirby’s Adventure, mercifully, is pretty easy to find these days. It’s part of the Nintendo Switch Online service for basic subscribers, and, until March 27 of 2023, can be downloaded in its 3D Classics form on the Nintendo 3DS. If you happen to still have an NES around, the cartridge isn’t tough to find nor is it usually expensive, though, you’ll find the occasional seller asking significantly more than others. Nightmare in Dream Land, on the other hand, is one you can only find on the Wii U shop, which, like its 3DS counterpart, is soon to vanish. And is also contained within a system that sold fewer consoles in its entire life than the SNES had by the time Kirby’s Adventure was originally in development. Hopefully, that finds a new home soon, and doesn’t just become another basically lost Nintendo title that deserved better.

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