I’m a big fan of Nintendo’s Kirby series. Adventure, Superstar, Crystal Shards – all unassailable classics, and by my reckoning some of the best platformers ever. But like all Kirby fans, I’ve often wondered: what of Kirby’s past? What sequence of events molded this complex character into the benign, mute sphere we know and love today? What was Kirby like… as a child?

Oh! Apparently he had a grotesque, prehensile tendril sprouting from the top of his skull. Or maybe that’s supposed to be a strand of cartoon hair. Wait a second, does this mean Kirby had to go bald at some point? Just how old is Kirby? What kind of secrets has he been hiding?!

Yeah, this a weird one. Back in ’95, Nintendo put the task of creating a Kirby prequel in the hands of developer DMA Studios. Kid Kirby was to serve as a showcase for the SNES mouse, which up to that point had only really been used for Mario Paint. However, because of the peripheral’s flagging sales (and because Mario Paint is exactly enough to merit any piece of hardware’s existence anyway), the game was canned.

Kirby’s checkered past was, alas, lost to time, and a shamefaced DMA Studios would go on to change their name and busy themselves with lesser projects like the Grand Theft Auto series.

Looking at these few pieces of leaked art, I’m transported back to a very specific time in the history of gaming, when clumsy pre-rendered models began to supplant not only in-game sprites, but the traditional illustrations that used to define a game’s marketing materials.

Granted, this wasn’t universally a bad thing; some of these games had great aesthetics that can still bear scrutiny today (Super Mario RPG, Donkey Kong Country… um… Donkey Kong Country 2). But as someone who was always inspired as much by the art of video games as the content of the games themselves, I feel like some of the spark that had drawn me the medium was extinguished. C’est la vie, Kid Kirby. C’est la vie.

Anyway, I guess I’m going to be doing this as a regular feature now, so if you know of any interesting cancelled, obscure, or otherwise forgotten titles from the heyday of classic gaming, feel free to let me know in the comments!

The first time I saw footage of Mr. Gimmick, my immediate reaction was: “holy [expletive], this is Badnix!”

Not because there are any specific similarities, mind you (although the protagonist has a shade of Rogginess). But it gives form to what the comic tries to be: a time capsule of the kind of vibrant, immersive worlds you used to see in the great console games of the 80’s and 90’s, still untarnished by time, nostalgia, or a procession of bad sequels and remakes.

Gimmick‘s creator, Sunsoft programmer Tomomi Sakai, developed the game for the Famicom (NES) in 1992, hoping to produce an 8-bit game that was competitive with the newer 16-bit games that were dominating the market. From a numbers standpoint, he failed – the game sold poorly, and was never released outside of Japan and Scandanavia (?!) – but from any other perspective Gimmick more than succeeds.

Watch the video. The graphics and music are among the system’s best, the latter being partly due to a special sound chip developed for the game. The game mechanics are surprisingly sophisticated as well, with curved and sloping worlds that would seem more at place in Super Mario World then an obscure NES title. There’s even a simple physics system that seems to affect every enemy and object in the game! Pretty amazing stuff. Sakai mentions in an interview that even Shigeru Miyamoto, notoriously stingy with praise, had to admit that the game impressed him.

Moreover, the game is rich with that sense of fun and brightly-colored absurdity that drove games like Super Mario Bros. and Kirby’s Adventure to father dynasties. Like those games, Gimmick serves up a world that makes no logical sense, that exists entirely on its own terms, and yet completely sucks you in. I absolutely adore it.

Sadly, the game is pretty rare, and finding a copy that will work on a North American console is, well, literally impossible! And even if you do find it, the game is so incredibly Nintendo-hard that you might have a hard time getting through it. For most of us, gameplay videos will have to do. (Also internet piracy.)

– CC