Shovel Knight looks like a lost NES game, and it is not one. The day before it came out, Yacht Club Games’ David D’Angelo published a list of the ways his team had broken the console’s rules. The picture is 400 pixels wide, not 256. The palette has four colours the NES could never show. Sprites have more colours than the hardware allowed, nothing flickers when too many share a line, and the backgrounds scroll in five or six layers. The music was written for a sound chip that only Japanese Famicom cartridges carried. The aim, D’Angelo wrote, was “a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game”: the NES as players remember it, with “modern conveniences” where the old games had been cruel.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Yacht Club Games, a studio in Los Angeles founded by former members of WayForward.
- Funding: Kickstarter, March to April 2013. The campaign asked for $75,000 and raised $311,502.
- Released: 26 June 2014, on the Nintendo 3DS, Wii U and Windows; later on the PlayStation consoles, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
- Music: Jake Kaufman, with two guest pieces by Manami Matsumae; written in FamiTracker.
- Influences: Mega Man, DuckTales, Castlevania, Zelda II and Super Mario Bros. 3.
- Sales: 2.65 million copies by September 2019.
Breaking the NES
D’Angelo’s article, “Breaking the NES for Shovel Knight”, sets out what the team kept and what it changed.
| NES rule | What Shovel Knight did |
|---|---|
| A picture 256 pixels wide | A virtual screen of 400×240, the NES’s height in a 16:9 shape, each pixel drawn 4.5 pixels square on a 1080p television, “avoiding the black bars you would see in an NES virtual console game” |
| A fixed palette, which D’Angelo counted at 54 colours | The NES palette, plus four colours of Yacht Club’s own: a dark purple, a deep red, a beige for a sheepskin cloak and a light brown to give the characters more variety |
| Three colours and transparency per sprite | Four or five colours per sprite, which NES artists such as Capcom’s on Mega Man had imitated by laying one sprite over another |
| Eight sprites on a line, then flicker | No flicker at all, but levels designed so the screen does not get crowded |
| One background layer | Five or six layers of parallax scrolling |
| The NES’s five sound channels | Three more, from Konami’s VRC6, an expansion chip some Famicom cartridges carried |
What the team kept was the look of the period’s habits. Large bosses still fight on a black screen with no background, as they did on the NES, where “the boss is the background”. The PPU entry explains the rules being broken, and why counts of the palette differ: Ricoh’s own specification describes 52 colours. The APU entry lists the VRC6’s extra channels: two pulse waves and a sawtooth. Jake Kaufman wrote the main score in FamiTracker, which exports music as NES machine code. Matsumae contributed “A Thousand Leagues Below (Iron Whale)” and “Flowers of Antimony (The Explodatorium)”, credited to her as tracks 20 and 33 on the original soundtrack.
Playing it
The hero is a knight whose weapon is a spade. He swings it to dig and to fight, and pressing down in mid-air turns it into a pogo stick, so that he bounces off enemies’ heads. That came from Capcom’s DuckTales, where Scrooge McDuck bounces on his cane, and Wireframe later called Shovel Knight “an homage, of sorts”. The other borrowings were as plain. Stages are picked from a map like Super Mario Bros. 3’s, each ends with a themed boss, as in Mega Man, and Nintendo Life’s reviewer, noting the health and magic upgrades to buy, found it so close to Zelda II that “Much of Shovel Knight plays like the game Zelda II should have been”.
The modern part is the way it handles failure. “If you do die, will you return to the place of your death to collect your scattered bags of riches?” Nintendo Life asked. “If you manage to snag them, you lose nothing… but if you die again, they’re gone for good.” Checkpoints can be smashed for treasure; Wireframe called it “a particularly cunning risk-reward mechanic”, since a broken checkpoint will not catch you when you die. Yacht Club described its difficulty curve in three tiers: “each room is harder than the last until you reach a checkpoint, each stretch of rooms between checkpoints is harder than the last until you reach a new level, and each level is harder than the last until you beat the game. … If it’s right after a checkpoint, it shouldn’t be too challenging, and if it’s right before a checkpoint, it should feel pretty scary!”
The Kickstarter and after
Yacht Club began the project in January 2013 and took it to Kickstarter that March, asking for $75,000. The campaign raised $311,502, more than $300,000 as Wireframe recalled it, and its stretch goals promised more: a battle mode, a challenge mode, and campaigns in which players could play as three of the game’s bosses. Yacht Club kept those promises over five years, for free. Plague of Shadows made the bomb-throwing Plague Knight playable, Specter of Torment gave the scythe-wielding Specter Knight a campaign of wall-running and slashing, and King of Cards gave King Knight a shoulder bash and a card game called Joustus. The original game was renamed Shovel of Hope, and everything was collected as Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove in 2019, alongside a fighting game, Shovel Knight Showdown.
Wireframe summed up the game in 2020: “Everything in Shovel Knight feels so right, from the shovel-bouncing mechanics, to the difficulty level, to the secret-laden level design… The best 2D platformer of the generation? Probably, yes.” By 2019 the game had sold 2.65 million copies. Spin-offs followed, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon (2021) and Shovel Knight Dig (2022), made with the British studio Nitrome, and Yacht Club’s next game, the top-down Mina the Hollower, had raised more than $1.2 million on Kickstarter by late 2022.
Sources
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Jake Kaufman, Shovel Knight Original Soundtrack, 27 June 2014 — primary release: Kaufman’s score and sound effects; tracks 20 and 33 credit Manami Matsumae.
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David D’Angelo, “Breaking the NES for Shovel Knight”, Gamasutra (now Game Developer), 25 June 2014 (web, secondary): the 400×240 screen; the 54 colours and four additions; colours per sprite and Mega Man’s layering; no flicker; five to six parallax layers; black-screen bosses; Jake Kaufman, FamiTracker and the VRC6’s three extra channels; “a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game”; “modern conveniences”. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/breaking-the-nes-for-shovel-knight
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Philip J Reed, Shovel Knight review, Nintendo Life, 26 June 2014 (web, secondary): the treasure lost on death; breakable checkpoints; Mega Man, Zelda II, Castlevania and Super Mario Bros. 3; the downward thrust; 9/10. https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/3ds-eshop/shovel_knight
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Nintendo World Report, “Shovel Knight Scheduled for June 26 Release”, June 2014 (web, secondary). http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/37618/shovel-knight-scheduled-for-june-26-release
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Wireframe issue 7, February 2019, p. 53: DuckTales and its homage in Shovel Knight.
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Wireframe issue 26, October 2019, p. 46: Shovel Knight “a shining example of how to do neo-retro properly”.
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Wireframe issue 33, February 2020, p. 7: six years of support from Shovel of Hope in 2014; the free expansions; Shovel Knight Dig with Nitrome.
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Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, p. 49: breakable checkpoints.
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Wireframe issue 45, November 2020, p. 40: “The best 2D platformer of the generation?”; DuckTales, Mega Man and early Castlevania.
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Wireframe issue 49, March 2021, pp. 41–42: the Yacht Club team on difficulty and checkpoints, from Shovel of Hope to King of Cards.
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Wireframe issue 68, November 2022, pp. 6–7: Treasure Trove in 2019; “Shovel Knight raised over $300,000 on the site in 2013”; Mina the Hollower at $1.2 million.
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Wikipedia, “Shovel Knight” (web, secondary): founders from WayForward; January 2013; the Kickstarter goal, total and stretch goals, citing Joystiq, 14 April 2013; release platforms; the three campaigns, Showdown and Treasure Trove; 2.65 million copies by September 2019, citing USgamer; Pocket Dungeon and Dig release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovel_Knight