HAL Laboratory’s games are meant to be liked on sight. “Aim for love at first sight” is the company’s own design rule, as Wireframe reported it, and its best-known character, Kirby, is a pink ball who floats over any gap. Behind the friendly games is a company that nearly went under. By 1991 HAL had a decade of programming and publishing behind it and an expensive failure on its hands, and it survived because Nintendo rescued it and one of its own programmers, Satoru Iwata, took charge. In the years either side of that rescue it made Kirby’s Dream Land, helped finish EarthBound and started Super Smash Bros.
A club in Akihabara
Wireframe gives HAL’s founding as 1980, in Tokyo, by Mitsuhiro Ikeda. The name comes from the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey: HAL is one letter away from IBM. The logo, a dog sitting on eggs, puzzled people for years. HAL’s director Satoshi Mitsuhara explained that a dog does not lay eggs, so nobody knows what will hatch from them: “HAL Laboratory is a company that will surprise people and creates something unimaginable.”
Iwata told the story from the inside. As a student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology he spent his time at a Tokyo computer shop, where he and other enthusiasts “formed a club … and soon rented an apartment in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, where we began designing our own games”. That group, he said, “is what became the company known today as HAL”. He was already writing games for Commodore’s 6502-based computers, the same processor family as the Famicom’s. When he graduated in 1982 he joined HAL full-time as its fifth employee. Edge later reported that for the first six months his father would not speak to him.
Programming for Nintendo
The Famicom came out in 1983, and HAL was ready for it. Nintendo first called on the company to rescue a project that had fallen behind schedule, which came out as Pinball. Iwata programmed Golf, Pinball, Balloon Fight and F-1 Race, all sold under Nintendo’s name. Golf fitted an entire 18-hole course into a few kilobytes, which Wireframe says rival developers had tried and failed to do. HAL’s reputation for technical work started there, and with it a run of golf games that later included Kirby’s Dream Course.
HAL also made its own games. Its block-pushing Eggerland puzzles became a series of around a dozen games in Japan; in the West the series was known as Adventures of Lolo, first released on the NES in 1989. HAL converted arcade games such as Defender II and Millipede for home consoles, and it published other developers’ work. It had its own American arm, HAL America, which in 1989 was shipping Adventures of Lolo, Air Fortress and Rollerball, and later published Human’s Kabuki: Quantum Fighter and NCAA Basketball for the Super NES. On the Game Boy it made Trax (1989), a short top-down shooter whose round tank Wireframe thought looked “uncannily like” Kirby.
Near bankruptcy
By the early 1990s sales were slowing. Then Metal Slader Glory (1991), an ambitious science-fiction RPG for the Famicom, failed. Its cartridges were expensive to make, and Wireframe repeats the legend that it barely sold enough copies to cover its advertising. The company was close to bankruptcy when Nintendo stepped in. Iwata became president in 1993. HAL closed its publishing arm and, in Wireframe’s words, began “taking a ‘quality over quantity’ approach”.
Kirby and EarthBound
The game that rescued HAL’s reputation was already being made. Masahiro Sakurai had joined at 19 and was designing a Game Boy platformer that any player could finish; its placeholder hero stayed in the final game as Kirby. Kirby’s Dream Land came out in 1992 and sold more than a million copies in its first year. Kirby’s Adventure (NES, 1993) let Kirby copy the powers of the enemies he swallowed, and Kirby Super Star (SNES, 1996) added races, time trials, a boss rush and other sub-games to the platforming. Asked in 2001 which of his games he liked best, Iwata named “the original Kirby game and Smash Brothers”.
HAL also helped other companies finish their games. Mother 2, the Super Famicom sequel to Shigesato Itoi’s RPG, was being developed by Ape and had stalled. Itoi later recalled Iwata’s verdict: “If we use what you’ve got now, it’ll take two years to fix. If we start from scratch, we can get this done in six months.” HAL helped with the programming, and the game came out in 1994; Nintendo released it in America in 1995 as EarthBound. Iwata also ported the battle program of the Game Boy Pokémon games to the Nintendo 64 for Pokémon Stadium, and HAL co-developed Pokémon Snap (1999), in which the player photographs Pokémon instead of catching them.
Smash Bros.
Sakurai’s next idea was a fighting game that newcomers could enjoy. Wireframe reports that Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto at first resisted HAL’s plan to put Nintendo’s characters into it. It came out in Japan in 1999 as All-Star Dai-Rantou Smash Brothers, in Edge’s transliteration, and in the West as Super Smash Bros. Edge described its developer as a “longtime Nintendo affiliate” and found that HAL had worked to make it “as accessible (also read enjoyable) as possible”: a fighter knocked out of the arena had time to get back in instead of being disqualified. Super Smash Bros. Melee followed on the GameCube in 2001, and Kirby Air Ride in 2003.
After Iwata
In 2000 Iwata joined Nintendo’s board, and in 2002 he became Nintendo’s president. In 2001 Edge described HAL as a “subsidiary of Nintendo Co Ltd” that had worked so closely with it that “much of its work is virtually indistinguishable from its parent company”. Masayoshi Tanimura followed Iwata as HAL’s president. Sakurai announced in August 2003 that he was leaving; he went on directing Smash Bros. games through his own company, Sora.
HAL kept making Kirby games, among them Touch! Kirby for the Nintendo DS in 2005 and Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Switch, 2022), the first main Kirby game in full 3D, which had sold 7.52 million copies by March 2024. It also created new series: BoxBoy! (Nintendo 3DS, 2015) is a puzzle platformer about a square hero who extends copies of himself, and a spin-off company, HAL Egg, made the smartphone game Part Time UFO (2018). In 2019 Wireframe named Shigefumi Kawase as president and quoted his summary of the company from HAL’s website: “With care and love, we make our products one at a time for you, our customer.”
Sources
- Wireframe issue 17, June 2019, pp. 50–53, Developer Profile: HAL Laboratory: the founding, the name and the logo (Satoshi Mitsuhara, speaking to Forbes); “Aim for love at first sight”; Iwata’s Famicom games and Golf; Eggerland/Adventures of Lolo, arcade conversions and publishing; Trax; Metal Slader Glory and the near-bankruptcy; Iwata as president; Sakurai and Kirby’s Dream Land; Miyamoto and Smash Bros.; Tanimura and Kawase; BoxBoy!, Pokémon Snap and HAL Egg.
- Satoru Iwata, keynote address, Game Developers Conference, March 2005, transcript published by Nintendo World Report (web, secondary): the club and the Akihabara apartment; joining HAL; Pinball. http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/pr/10378/satoru-iwata-gdc-keynote-transcription
- Edge issue 103, November 2001, p. 98, “FAQ: Satoru Iwata”: HAL as a Nintendo subsidiary; his part-time Commodore work; his favourite games.
- Edge issue 113, August 2002: the RedEye column on Iwata and his father.
- Computer Play, April 1989, and Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, January 1989: HAL America’s NES titles. Club Nintendo (Germany), October 1991: Kabuki Quantum Fighter, © HAL America 1990. Game Informer issue 3, January 1992: HAL America’s NCAA Basketball.
- Edge issue 67, January 1999: Smash Brothers preview (developer HAL Laboratory; publisher Nintendo).
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: EarthBound, Super Smash Bros. and Melee credited to HAL Laboratory.
- Nintendo Power issue 120, May 1999, p. 62: Pokémon Snap, © 1999 HAL Laboratory, Inc./Jupiter Corp.
- Edge issue 127, September 2003: Kirby Air Ride (developer HAL Laboratory). Edge issue 150, June 2005: Touch! Kirby.
- “Shigesato Itoi Visits Arino Kacho’s Challenge Room”, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, 17 September 2019 (web): Itoi on Iwata and Mother 2. https://www.1101.com/gccxmother/en/2019-09-17.html
- For Iwata’s career, Sakurai and the Kirby games, including sales figures, see the sources for Satoru Iwata, Masahiro Sakurai and Kirby’s Dream Land.