Masahiro Sakurai Shows Off Original Kirby Design Docs and Other Secrets in New Video

Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai presented the original design documents for Kirby and other secrets of Kirby’s Dream Land for the Game Boy in his 100th episode of “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games” on YouTube.

The documents aren’t new per se, as Sakurai said he presented them at Kirby’s 25th Anniversary Orchestra Concert in Japan in 2017. However, he decided to give the same secret dev presentation in a way that is new to Kirby fans outside of Japan.

In the video, Sakurai said he came up with the concept for Kirby’s Dream Land around May 1990 at the age of 19 — he’s 52 now — making the game simple enough to invite people who are new to video games and showing them how fun they can be. It was so simple that it was 20 minutes short. All Kirby did in the original game was hover, swallow and spit out enemies because he didn’t possess any Copy Abilities until Kirby’s Adventure.

Kirby’s Dream Land was developed in under a year using the trackball HAL Laboratory made and hooked up to the Twin Famicom. Sakurai demonstrated how multipurpose the Twin Famicom was, as it allowed him and his fellow developers to draw the pixel art, combine the art to create the characters, conducted animation tests for them, and even create the backgrounds and title screen.

The most important part of the presentation, though, was how Sakurai was able to work around the strict memory limitations the small game presented. Sakurai designed Kirby’s Dream Land to meet to ROM size of 512 kilobits, but it was released in 2 megabits. To cut down on ROM space, he designed the characters to make them fit while retaining their true size. For example, he created Waddle Dee and Waddle Doo by reusing the back half of one of them, and stuck three dots on a tree in one of the backgrounds to create the boss Whispy Woods.

Despite the limitations that came about during the making of Kirby’s Dream Land, the game went on to sell five million copies worldwide, topping the Game Boy’s best-sellers charts for several months straight, thus demonstrating the power of the Twin Famicom.

Today, over 30 years later, Kirby has jumped from side-scrolling to open-world games with the release of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which was made without Sakurai’s involvement. He hasn’t developed a Kirby game since Kirby and the Amazing Mirror in 2004, as he was focused on the Super Smash Bros. series.

Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. She has contributed her work to various publications, including Digital Trends, TheGamer, Twinfinite, Mega Visions, and The Escapist. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love for Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.