Alex Kidd fought his bosses at rock-paper-scissors. At the end of a level in Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986), the player did not jump on a villain’s head; they played a round of janken, the Japanese version of the game, and a wrong guess cost a life. The boy with the huge ears and the rock-breaking punch was Sega’s answer to Mario through the Master System years, the character Hyper called “probably Sega’s most recognised character from the mid 80s to the early 90s”. Many players met him without buying a cartridge, because later Master Systems had Miracle World built in. He kept the job until Sonic the Hedgehog arrived in 1991.
Fast facts
- Creator: Kotaro Hayashida, director and designer of Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
- Developer and publisher: Sega.
- First game: Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Master System, 1986.
- Series: six games on the Master System and Mega Drive, 1986–1990, one of them also an arcade game.
- Built in: later Master Systems and the Master System II in Europe, North America and Brazil.
- Successor: Sonic the Hedgehog, from 1991.
- Remake: Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (2021).
Miracle World
Alex is a prince of the planet Aries and a master of Shellcore, a martial art that lets him smash rocks with his fists. The tyrant Janken the Great has usurped his family’s kingdom, and Alex sets out to free it, facing Janken’s henchmen, called Stone Head, Scissors Head and Paper Head in the English version. Breaking blocks turns up bags of money, which Alex spends in shops on items and extra lives. He also rides a Sukopako motorcycle, a pedal-powered Peticopter that fires missiles, and a Suisui boat. Retro Gamer later picked the motorbike as one of the greatest power-ups ever: Mario could grow bigger, it noted, but Alex could ride a little red motorcycle.
Hayashida told the SEGA Master System: A Visual Compendium that he never set out to copy Nintendo: “we were aware of Mario, but we never tried making a Mario-style game.” He mixed adventure into the platform game instead: “I added every idea that I had! I included everything. Every vehicle, every item… Everything!” The project had not even begun as Alex’s. In a 2018 interview for John Szczepaniak’s The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Hayashida said it started as a Dragon Ball game; when Sega lost the licence, the team made up its own hero, and Goku’s Power Pole became Alex’s punch.
Rock, paper, scissors
The janken bosses were the game’s oddest idea, and Hayashida came to regret them. “The game flow suffered immensely, and you cannot practise to hone your skills and get better,” he said. “Janken is very popular in Japan, after all. We weren’t consciously thinking of Europe.” A Telepathy Ball found later in the game shows what the opponent is thinking, but until then each match is, as Wireframe put it in 2021, “down to sheer luck”. The game had another awkward habit. On the original Master System the item menu opened from the pause button, which was on the console, not the joypad, so using an item meant getting up and walking to the machine.
In the Japanese version Alex finishes each level by eating a rice ball; Western releases changed it to a hamburger.
The other games
None of the later games was a straight sequel. Hyper’s retrospective in 2005 noted that each had “its own unique and distinct flavour”.
| Game | Year | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Alex Kidd in Miracle World | 1986 | Master System |
| Alex Kidd: BMX Trial | 1987 | Master System, Japan only |
| Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars | 1988 | Master System, from an arcade game |
| Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle | 1989 | Mega Drive |
| Alex Kidd in High-Tech World | 1989 | Master System |
| Alex Kidd in Shinobi World | 1990 | Master System |
BMX Trial put Alex on a bike in a top-down race against time and needed Sega’s Paddle Control, which kept it in Japan. The Lost Stars began in the arcades; Yutaka Sugano, who co-designed it as a new recruit, remembered telling himself “Make it harder! Make it harder!” Computer and Video Games reviewed the Master System version in 1988 as a “worthy follow up”, with better graphics and digitised speech ordering Alex to “find the miracle ball”, and counted Alex Kidd among the Master System’s essential platform games.
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle took him to the Mega Drive in Japan in 1989 and to the Genesis in America in 1990, still searching for his father. Computer and Video Games’ Complete Guide to Sega gave it 69 per cent and said it lacked the spark of the 8-bit games: “For ardent Alex Kidd fans only.” High-Tech World reached Britain at the end of 1989 through Sega’s distributor, Virgin Mastertronic, at £22.95; it was a reworked version of a 1987 Japanese game based on the manga Anmitsu Hime. Alex Kidd in Shinobi World (1990) sent him into a comic version of Sega’s ninja game Shinobi, with a lobster in place of the arcade’s samurai boss Lobster.
Built in, then replaced
From 1990 the cheaper Master System II came with Alex Kidd in Miracle World stored inside it. Retro Gamer called the built-in game “a clincher for any late adopters” in Europe. In the United States, Sega’s magazine Sega Visions listed the “Master System II (with Alex Kidd)” at $49.95 in 1992, and in Brazil, where Tectoy sold Sega’s consoles, the Master System II was advertised as coming with the game.
Alex Kidd never dented Nintendo’s lead, and Sega built a new mascot for the Mega Drive. Retro Gamer put it bluntly: “Alex Kidd just wasn’t up to the job”. After Sonic the Hedgehog arrived in 1991, a later Master System II replaced the built-in Miracle World with Sonic, and that version is now the rarer one.
Later appearances
Alex turned up among Sega’s veterans in Sumo Digital’s Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (2010). In 2021 Merge Games and the developer Jankenteam released Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, a remake with redrawn graphics over the original level layouts. Wireframe found it “lovely to look at, slightly less lovely to actually play”, and was surprised that the rock-paper-scissors battles had been left “pretty much intact”.
Sources
- SEGA Master System: A Visual Compendium (Bitmap Books): p. 19, Kotaro Hayashida on Miracle World and the janken bosses; p. 44, BMX Trial (1987, Japan only, Paddle Control); p. 80, Yutaka Sugano on the arcade Lost Stars (Master System version 1988); p. 136, Shinobi World (1990) and its boss parodies; p. 9, built-in games on later consoles.
- Hyper (Australia) issue 143, September 2005, pp. 86–87: “Chronicles of the Kidd” (Aries, Shellcore, Janken the Great and his henchmen, five Master System games and one Mega Drive game, the Master System 2 built-in game, BMX Trial, Hayashida).
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, pp. 22–27: Master System collector’s guide (the built-in Miracle World, the later Sonic variant, BMX Trial).
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004, p. 21 (Alex Kidd “just wasn’t up to the job”); issue 53, 2008, pp. 42–43 (Miracle World as “the classic game”: its vehicles and shops); issue 112, March 2013 (the motorbike among the greatest power-ups).
- Computer and Video Games issue 80, June 1988, pp. 118–119: Tony Takoushi’s Mean Machines column, Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars.
- Computer and Video Games, The Complete Guide to Sega, 1990: Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (69 per cent).
- Sega Visions vol. 1 no. 1, June 1990, p. 22: Enchanted Castle arrives on the Genesis. Sega Visions vol. 1 no. 9, August 1992, p. 65: “Master System II (with Alex Kidd)”, $49.95.
- Zero issue 2, December 1989: Alex Kidd in High-Tech World (Virgin Mastertronic, £22.95).
- SuperGame (Brazil) issue 1, July 1991: Master System II advertisement: the console comes with Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
- Edge issue 260, December 2013, p. 114: Sumo Digital studio profile (Alex Kidd in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing).
- Wireframe issue 42, August 2020, p. 27 (Miracle World DX announced), and issue 53, July 2021, pp. 110–111 (review: Merge Games and Jankenteam; the janken battles; the pause button on the console).
- Josh Wirtanen, “When Sega’s Dragon Ball License Expired, Alex Kidd in Miracle World Was Born”, Retrovolve, 19 June 2021 (web, secondary), quoting Hayashida’s interview in John Szczepaniak, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, vol. 3 (2018). https://retrovolve.com/when-sega-lost-the-rights-to-dragon-ball-alex-kidd-in-miracle-world-was-born/
- Sega Retro, “Alex Kidd in Miracle World” (web, secondary): release dates; the vehicles and shop items; the Telepathy Ball; the rice ball changed to a hamburger; Hayashida’s Dragon Ball interview. https://segaretro.org/Alex_Kidd_in_Miracle_World
- Sega Retro, “Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle” (web, secondary): Japanese release 10 February 1989; United States January 1990. https://segaretro.org/Alex_Kidd_in_the_Enchanted_Castle
- Wikipedia, “Alex Kidd in High-Tech World” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): the 1987 Japanese game Anmitsu Hime, based on the manga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Kidd_in_High-Tech_World