In August 2022, designer and director Masahiro Sakurai created a channel about game development, which he has kept up with ever since. The 100th and newest video on the channel shows some details about Tatweer Kirby Dream Land for GameBoy.
Kirby’s Dream Land was the first game in the Pink Acorn franchise developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. Masahiro Sakurai was responsible for creating the character and was the director of several games in the series including this opening act. It is curious to mention that in this game Kirby is not yet able to use the transcription abilities that have become his trademark from Kirby’s Adventure (NES).
This isn’t the first time Sakurai has made a video about the game in design concept videos. However, the new video includes information and curiosities he presented exclusively during the 2017 curated concert that celebrated the series’ 25th anniversary. It’s about 17 minutes worth of watching for any fan of the franchise.
To develop the game, Sakurai and his team used a system called the Twin Famicom, a version of the Japanese NES that also included the “Famicom Disk System”. With development tools on the disc and a self-made trackball to back it up, they found the system to be very practical for game making at the time.
The video also shows shots of the development tools that allowed the team to draw pixel art and combine parts to make sprites of the character that would be used in the game. Clever tactics and solutions currently seen as a waste of effort were used to repurpose some of these parts, allowing for the final game’s compressed file size, although still larger than the team had intended.
At one point in the video, Sakurai shows a design document, revealing that he worked on the pixel art first and then made the illustrations there. The details drawn in this document are very similar to the concept of pushing an enemy off the screen in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Smash.
In the end, Sakurai highlights the visor design on the Meta Knight mask and the prototype images from Kirby’s Super Star (SNES). Early in the development of the Super Nintendo game, the director decided to design early versions of Kirby in his various forms. Thus, he emphasized that it was very important for him and the team to have a clear vision of how things would look in practice during development, and these animation models made all the difference in the creation of the game.
