Three days before Kid Icarus went on sale in Japan, its designer was told that if the master disk did not go to the factory that day, the game would miss Christmas. Toru Osawa was 23, in his second year at Nintendo, and this was his first game. He had wanted to make an action game rooted in the Greek myths he loved, with the feel of a role-playing game. What came out of his team’s all-night sessions was stranger than that: an angel with a bow, a shop that took credit, enemies that turned the hero into an eggplant, and a final level that suddenly became a shooting game. It was nicknamed an ochi-ge, a “falling game”, because one missed jump sent Pit to his death.
Fast facts
- Japanese title: Hikari Shinwa: Palutena no Kagami (“Myth of Light: Palutena’s Mirror”).
- Developer: Nintendo R&D1, Gunpei Yokoi’s department; the programming was done by an outside company.
- Director: Satoru Okada. Producer: Gunpei Yokoi.
- Designers: Toru Osawa, joined late in development by Yoshio Sakamoto.
- Released: Famicom Disk System, Japan, December 1986; NES, 1987.
- Hero: Pit, an angel, sent to rescue the goddess Palutena from Medusa.
One designer and a deadline
Osawa told the story in a 2004 Nintendo Dream interview with Sakamoto and two other colleagues from R&D1. For most of 1986 he worked on the game alone. He wrote the specifications and drew the graphics himself, took them to the outside company that was writing the program, and played what came back. He had been promised more staff once the department finished Metroid, which came out on 6 August. When Sakamoto came back from his holiday afterwards and looked at the game, his verdict was “It’s not done.” At that point, Sakamoto said, it was a game in which Pit “just jumps and shoots arrows”.
Sakamoto helped sort out the game design, and the pace picked up. The two of them spent a night settling how the game would work, and at dawn, with no bedding in the building, they took down the curtains and slept in them on flattened cardboard boxes, until colleagues arriving at eight woke them. Osawa got married during development. He gave up his honeymoon and asked for three days off; on the second evening his manager phoned while he was eating dinner and asked him to come back in.
The Disk System helped them cut it fine. Disks were copied in seconds on rows of disk writers at the factory, so the team could keep working until three days before the release date. The last stage was decided in a hurry. Osawa said there had been plans for more, but in the end they decided on the spot to make it a sideways-scrolling shoot-’em-up. “Even we were surprised, and we were the ones making it,” Sakamoto said. There was no time left for a staff roll in the Japanese version, which Osawa regretted. The Western cartridge version added one, along with a more elaborate ending.
Climbing out of the Underworld
Pit starts at the bottom of the Underworld and climbs. The screen scrolls upwards as he jumps from platform to platform, and if he drops off the bottom of the screen he dies. The game has three worlds, the Underworld, the Overworld and the Skyworld, and each ends in a fortress: a maze of rooms with a guardian to defeat and one of the three sacred treasures to win. The fourth world, the Palace in the Sky, is the one Osawa decided on at the last minute. Pit puts on the treasures, including the Wings of Pegasus, and flies through a side-scrolling shooting stage to reach Medusa.
Enemies drop hearts, and hearts are money, not health. Pit spends them in shops on items that Retro Gamer lists in detail:
- a Chalice and a Bottle to refill his life, the Bottle automatically when he would otherwise die, and a Barrel that carries up to five bottles;
- an Angel’s Feather, which floats him back to safety if he falls down a hole;
- a Map, Torch and Pencil, to find his position in a fortress and mark off the rooms he has visited;
- a Hammer, which frees stone Centurions who then help in boss fights;
- a Harp, which turns every enemy on screen into hammers.
A rare find is a credit card, which lets Pit buy what he cannot afford and then pay off the debt with hearts collected later. Osawa laughed about it in 2004: a credit card in Greek mythology. The shops were a way to bargain, too. On the Famicom, whose second controller had a microphone, a player could get discounts by speaking to the shopkeepers. On the NES, Retro Gamer explains, pressing A and B on a second controller in a shop changes the prices, “though, beware, they don’t always go down”.
The Eggplant Wizard
The game’s best-remembered enemy came from a bonus. Osawa said he thought up the Eggplant Wizard during the summer bonus season. The Japanese word for a bonus, bōnasu, has nasu, eggplant, inside it, so he pictured an eggplant stuck on the end of a wizard’s staff. He had loved the Eggplant Man in Sakamoto’s Wrecking Crew, and wanted one of his own. The wizard throws eggplants (aubergines), and one hit turns Pit into a walking eggplant who cannot use his weapons until he finds a nurse to cure him. There was no memory to spare for a new character, so the team drew an eggplant over Pit and gave it legs.
Hard, and not sorry about it
Kid Icarus has several endings, depending on how well the player did, and the worst of them is a joke at Pit’s expense. Lose the game, and the game-over screen in the Japanese version says yararechatta, roughly “Got me!”. Osawa said that whenever he and Sakamoto worked together, a dark sense of humour crept in. Looking back in 2004, Osawa said the game’s harshness belonged to the mood of the time. Sakamoto described makers who set puzzles they thought players could not solve, and players who were determined to solve them.
Retro Gamer argued in 2012 that many players never got past “that opening vertical ascent”, and so never saw the game open out. Beyond the first world it becomes more exploratory, and Pit gains new powers. The cartridge version could not save to disk, so it gave the player a password instead, and in America Nintendo Power printed a player’s guide full of them.
Later
A Game Boy sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, followed in 1991. There was no further Kid Icarus game until Kid Icarus: Uprising for the Nintendo 3DS in 2012, after, as Retro Gamer put it, two decades of fans petitioning for a sequel.
Sources
- Nintendo Dream, interview with four Famicom Disk System developers (Yoshio Sakamoto, Hiroji Kiyotake, Toru Osawa, Kenji Yamamoto), 6 and 21 September 2004 issues (Japanese; quotations translated; republished on Nintendo DREAM WEB, 21 February 2023), pages 1–4: Osawa’s profile and first game; working alone with an outside programming company until Metroid was finished; Sakamoto joining and “just jumps and shoots arrows”; Greek mythology and the RPG feel; the curtains; the honeymoon; disk duplication and the master three days before the release on (as Osawa recalled) 19 December; the Eggplant Wizard, the bonus and Wrecking Crew; the credit card; the last-minute shooting stage; ochi-ge and yararechatta; the endings and the staff roll in the overseas version; the difficulty of the time. https://www.ndw.jp/disksystem-interview-230221/
- Retro Gamer issue 102, 2012, pp. 60–63, Kid Icarus feature: developer R&D1; NES release in 1987; hearts as currency and the items; the credit card; the Eggplant Wizard; the second-controller price trick; the opening ascent and the Palace in the Sky; Nintendo Power’s player’s guide.
- Retro Gamer issue 102, 2012, p. 96, review of Kid Icarus: Uprising: the 1986 Famicom debut, the three sacred treasures, Satoru Okada as director, the Game Boy sequel and the gap before Uprising.
- Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, “The Family Computer”: the microphone discounts in the shops.
- Retro Gamer issue 109, December 2012: Gunpei Yokoi named as the man behind Kid Icarus and Metroid.
- Wikipedia, “Kid Icarus (video game)” (web, secondary), citing Nintendo Dream issue 118 (2004): Yokoi’s producer credit; the rescue of Palutena; the three worlds and their fortresses; the password system on the NES. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Icarus_(video_game)