*Intro Music* [These subtitles are unfinished, but youtube won't let me submit them as unfinished subtitles.] Though hardcore platformers like Donkey Kong Country have always been some my favourite games in the genre, Some days I just want to sit down, relax and play a nice little game, Where I don't have to worry about making pixel perfect split-second jumps with the time limit but within this niche sub-Genre, One mascot stands above the rest... I'm, of course, talking about... Bubsy. I mean Kirby. Sorry, I get those confused. Oh, What a series of games, classics I dare to say. Especially, Kirby's Adventure on the NES. That's my favourite of the series, and a game I've always been wanting to make an episode on, but you can't really understand the development of this classic HAL Laboratory title without first learning about the creation of Kirby's Dream Land. Kirby's first outing, released on the Game Boy, and it became a critical step in the creation, and perfection, of Kirby's Adventure. So, I say on this episode of Beta64, let's discover the origins of Kirby, as we look at the development of both Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby's Adventure. So, let's start off with the big question, How did Kirby come to be, what spawned its creators to begin development on Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy? Well, it all starts with a 19 year old Masahiro Sakurai. Director of both Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby's Adventure, and who would eventually go on to direct the entire Super Smash Bros. series as well. When he first joined Nintendo, the company was looking to create a new game and were currently accepting applications. Specifically for a game that could be enjoyed by anyone. After hearing this, Sakurai went to the drawing board, looking to create a cute main character that anyone would love. He started off by drawing this balloon-like character, simply as a placeholder until he could come up with a better final design. But as time went on, the team started to really fall in love with this placeholder. They adored its simplistic nature and they unanimously decided to keep the protagonist completely unchanged from this original concept. Satoru Iwata, producer and programmer on Kirby's Adventure, mentioned in an interview that "When someone loves a character, they like to sketch them in their notebooks, right?" "That's why we gave Kirby a simple circular design, so anyone could draw him." Now, what about the name Kirby? How did that come about? Turns out his original name was actually Popopo (ポポポ) with the game itself being entitled Twinkle Popo But after finishing said game and talking it over with Nintendo, they jointly decided that a name change was in order before release. In the team's mind, they wanted their little game to be enjoyed by everyone, american kids included. (Thanks, Japan.) So, they asked Nintendo of America for any name suggestions they might have, one of which, for example, was Gasper. And it didn't make the cut. (obviously) The team was hoping for a name that sounded like an American idol, but instead went for one of them that really stood out... Kirby. (Kābī in Japanese) Turns out it was actually the same name as an American lawyer, John Kirby, who defended Nintendo in court, when Universal sued them for "ripping off" King Kong with their game, Donkey Kong. As a way to honor this wonderful man, the team decided to name their pink puffball after John Kirby, and in turn, changed the game's title to Hoshino Kirby, in Japan, which means Kirby of the Stars. (and it was called Kirby's Dreamland elsewhere) But it's interesting though. This magazine scan describing the game, while was in development actually refers to Kirby as PoPoPo. See? Right here. It says in Japanese. "Oboe yasui namaedesho. Boku, PoPoPo.", which means "It's an easy-to-learn name, I'd say. I'm PoPoPo." Kirby's main ability, showcased in Kirby's Dream Land, is of course being able to inhale. Whether it's air to fly or enemies to shoot, but how did that idea come about? Well, Sakurai, from the beginning, wanted the controls in the game to be... simple. So, instead of attacking the enemy yourself, he wanted you to be able to *use* enemies, to attack other enemies. At first, he considered having Kirby use the enemies as a Football, or as some call it, a soccer ball Basically, Kirby would have been heading enemies and kicking them all over the stage. In fact, that was the idea they were completely set on using. Up until they decided to include flying into the game After deciding that Kirby would soar through the air like a majestic pelican, they asked themselves "How would Kirby actually fly?" To which one of the members said "What if he puffed up like a balloon?" "But how would he do that?" asked another questioning team member. "Maybe by inhaling air?" And that is exactly what they did. But since Kirby can now inhale air to become a balloon, the next thought was "Wouldn't it be cool if he could inhale enemies too?" And the rest is history. There's a few more facts that make Dream Land's development story even more interesting, like how the game was developed using this system. A Famicom, merged with the Famicom disk system, and controlled using a track ball. No mouse. No keyboard. Just a track ball. So, in order to write code, they would have to use an on-screen keyboard. With the trackball controlling the cursor, to click the keys... Sounds insane, but Sakurai just assumed that was the way it was done (Just assumed that was the way it's done...) (what) Anyway, here's a look at the DEV tool that ran on that system. I'll admit, it's an interesting looking tool, but gosh... No keyboards just sounds... painful. In fact, Sakurai even said that using it, was like making a lunch... with a lunch box! But according to him, it wasn't all bad. It led to improvements managing the data processing load which, in turn, gave the characters a very... silky smooth movement, especially for a Game Boy game. Now, in addition to using a freaking trackball to make the game, to add more to the difficulty, the team only had 512 KiloBITS of space they could use for the game. And while that wasn't the smallest cartridge size available at the time, it was certainly a small amount of data especially by today's standards (Oh my gosh) But because of this limitation, the team used a lot of interesting techniques to save on space. Like how Waddle Dee and Waddle Doo are basically the same enemy, but with a different face. Or how Poppy Bros. Sr.'s animation is only three frames for the feet, and two for the head? And let's not forget Whispy Woods, whose only animated parts, the eyes and the mouth, are the same image, just rotated across the X-Axis. All of that save space gives the team enough room for the highly animated King Dedede, which happens to be the biggest space taking enemy in the game. Hey, you want to hear another interesting thing about enemies in this game? Turns out when you see an enemy fall off the screen or climb down a ladder, there is no collision detection telling the enemy, "Hey, bro. Uh, you, uh, you're no longer standing on the ground so, better fall right about now. Nope. Instead, Sakurai programmed that crap in. Every step of the enemy's movement was specifically written in hex Gosh, from a programming standpoint, that's legitimately insane. But I--I guess it worked, didn't it? *sigh?* I have to say though, the most interesting fact in this game's development story is that, originally, when Kirby died, he was going to fly off-screen. Kind of, like... some other game directed by Sakurai... Alright, Super Smash Bros! But here's the thing, even though the ideas are the same and even though both games were directed by Sakurai, He swears that he had completely forgotten about the idea when he created Smash Bros. You have to admit though, even the concept art looks a lot like the fully realized version in Smash. And finally, in 1992, Kirby's Dream Land was released for the Game Boy, receiving a mostly positive reception With the problems mainly just being a lack of content and easy difficulty but the positives more than outweighed the negatives most players found the game a relaxing cutesy platformer filled with wonderful worlds and memorable characters, and I agree completely. Now, why don't we talk about some unused stuff? The Cutting Room Floor managed to find a couple of unused Sprites in this game. One of them just happens to be an unused frame for Waddle Doo's animation showing the enemy looking up Nothing much else to say about that, but King Dedede also has some unused frames too. These have them shown with his hands on his face kind of like he's surprised or something like: "Boy, you found me!" And because these frames are so dark some believe that they were meant for a removed introduction scene. Something like: Having him walk from the side of the corner of the ring like: Hey, Kirby But of course that's all speculation. Don't take it as fact. Less than a year after the release of Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy, Kirby's Adventure was released for the NES Incredibly short time seeing how many improvements they made over the original game. How did a sequel start? Well while the team was finalizing Kirby's Dream Land, They had to start working on Kirby's Adventure's promotional artwork. It turns out though while the design of Kirby was pretty much a unanimous decision, His color did not end up that way. At least at first. It didn't really matter too much and Kirby's Dream Land seeing as the Game Boy didn't have any color. but once Kirby's Adventure came into the picture, there was a bit of an issue because everyone on the team had their own idea of what color Kirby was supposed to be. Though Sakurai had always considered Kirby to be pink from the very beginning, He was literally the only one on the team that thought so. Some people like Miyamoto himself thought the character was supposed to be yellow much like Pac-Man or (idk how to spell it, sorry) You know, from that japan-exclusive game boy game of the same name, you know Others on the team thought that kirby was supposed to be white, which was what was depicted on the North American Box art of Kirby's Dream Land due to this color confusion. But when second I insisted that kirby was supposed to be pink the rest of the team went along with the idea with Miyamoto even praising the color choices a fresh idea compared to the large array of yellow characters at the time. All the changes the team made in the sequel the biggest addition to kirby has to be his ability to Inhale enemies and now copy their abilities this was added as an attempt to make the game more enjoyable for skilled players Since the original game was mostly criticized for being short and easy, even though that was actually the way it was supposed to be designed. Well, maybe not short, but Sakurai went on record saying that it was supposed to be a somewhat easy game. For Kirby's Adventure, though, the team wanted to be able to appeal to both beginners and skilled players, By keeping the easy parts of the game intact but adding something, so that skilled players could have fun, too. That something just so happened to be adding the copying ability to Kirby's repertoire of skills. By adding these many enemy abilities for kirby to use it would allow players to experiment different ways of completing levels Originally though, there were actually going to be over 40 unique enemy abilities. But from those, the team only picked the best ones from the bunch which ended up being the 25 abilities that found their way into the final game of The ones that were cut there was one where you could create blocks one that allowed you to ride a rocket another that shrunk Kirby down and Even one called animal which allows you to scratch and bite enemies and was later introduced in Kirby Squeak squad in 2006 now with this fix in place for the game being too easy they had another problem on their hand Players had said in Kirby's dreamland. That Kirby was just too small so they made him bigger and Since the team decided to go to all that trouble of remaking the sprites they thought why not add some more moves then So they gave him a ton of different movements and animations in order to make our little protagonist so much more expressive Look at them. Just jumping and dancing around adorable Another addition added to the game were these little mini games decide to something simple and easy to play that would only require one button to play Originally there were going to be four different Minigames using this one button control scheme the first idea the team had was to make a game to see who could press a button the most times in a short period of time Ironically this is the one minigame idea that never came to fruition But even though this idea wasn't used it brought forth a bunch of different ideas that would eventually get in the game after The break your thumb idea came for see who could press the button first game or quick-draw And then the should I press the button game which became egg catcher and last was the button timing game called crane fever You know one of my favorite parts of Kirby's adventure and even in Kirby's dreamland is how? Beautiful the backgrounds are and just look at that gorgeous Masterpiece and That was exactly what the team was hoping people would say while playing the game Since the beginning the goal of the team was to make these backgrounds look nice enough just to look at on their own at this time in the game development world the team would have a Specific member whose job was just to work on the game backs, but in Kirby's adventure they actually had to design or create the maps first on paper and Then passed the drawing off to a mapper who would rework it into the game That's what made the backgrounds and Kirby's adventures just oh so beautiful While other games had a Mr. Random Joe working on the world look and feel the Kirby team had Artists who poured hours and hours of work into making the game Sparkle in every corner, and that's what makes this game so pleasant to look at and feel so special to play and so we've made it to unused Assets Within Kirby's adventure and Compared to Kirby's dreamland its sequel is a treasure trove of unused Graphics room Power-Ups among other things and Of course as always I recommend heading to the cutting room floor after the video if you want to learn some more in-depth information on these findings like exact tile set numbers for a new sprites or Even a ton of unused color palettes that I'll just be skipping over because there's a lot of other things I'd like to talk about besides 20-plus alternate color schemes so with that being said what do you say we head into these unused graphics? First let's look at some Sprites for levels and such like these unused tiles for a dark room variation Which is associated to graphics set two to using palace 8B 291 according to the cutting room floor's findings. This mock-up made by BmF five four one two three Shows what it likely would have looked like for this final screen to use this dark room variation quite beautiful if I do say so myself and I do Speaking of unused stage tiles of the seven water tiles only two of these actually found their way into the final game Though you might be thinking that these looked nothing like water tiles understandable Which is why we have this mock-up of what they would have looked like had they all been put into the game Next up we've got interesting on you sprites for the levels hubs hud due to the fact that these sprites are darker than the final hud and the fact that they look so much different than what we See normally in the game. It's very likely that these sprites are actually for an early version of the hud Completely different from what we see now oh And since we just talked about the level hub I probably should mention this a new sprite of the number seven which would have went Along nicely with all the other numbers placed on the stage doors So it's just it's luck there was never more than six levels in a hub world That's why I was never used a tragic. Tale of the seven will only wanted to be next you don't believe or not There's actually another thing that goes unused because of this same kind of situation Despite it being impossible to achieve normally in the final game by hack You can have up to three credits in the crane minigame instead of the normal one or two credits Doing this will cause this unused number three sprite to appear on the machine however Even with that extra chance the game will only count up to two kirby plushies. Hey since we're on the hud objects anyway let's talk about this Sprite which shows off kirby in a cannon as You can guess it was meant to be shown in that box right there. Which is usually reserved for showing off? What ability Kirby's got or what situation kirby is in so was there originally a cannon ability? No turns out as seen in this 3Ds port and for some strange reason the french version of the original game It was meant to appear when Kirby jumps into a cannon, but this doesn't happen in the original release though it is possible to see it in the final version of the game by using the mix ability and looking at the footage frame by frame It's see here it is Next why don't we look at some menus price for specific characters in Kirby's adventure? first let's start with the mini bosses Poppy bros senior has an unused Sprite that happens to be a vertically flipped version of his desk bright and Rolling turtle also has an unused frame. That's just his shell Probably the most likely theory is that originally this boss could hide in his shell to block against attacks But that's just a theory an unused Rolling Turtle Sprite theory Thanks for stating you remember back when I said there were quite a few removed abilities for Kirby back early in development Well it turns out one of those abilities is still in the game the shrinking ability though, technically It's not able to be used in the game But all the sprites are here to give us an idea of what disability would have looked like in the game Gold s on the cutting room floor made a nice animated mock-up showing kirby shrinking and a mini Kirby walking It's likely that this ability was replaced with the ufo one and here's why all The abilities in the game are put close together and banked 8 0 through 9 9 with the shrinking one being at 8C now Why is that? why is the ufO so much farther away from the rest of the abilities and Why is the scrap shrinking ability in the middle of all the other used ones? Could it be that the shrinking ability was removed later in development and that the UfO was just added in and dust LI further away From the others we can't say for sure of course But that does sound very very likely some of you may have recognized that the shrinking ability was actually used in a later Kirby game kirby and the amazing mirror for the Gameboy Advance as the mini ability However, it is a bit different as you can't do that slide attack while in the mini form unlike described ability in Kirby's adventure Where it looks like you could? Now it's about time that we look at the many unused rooms in Kirby's adventure a vast majority of which are scrapped museum rooms You know the ones where powerless enemies are put on display so you can eat them alive and steal their powers Yeah, those rooms turns out There are five of those that go unused Going in order of each room's Id when one 4 is a nice museum featuring the chili enemy which gives kirby the fries ability? While this stage is almost identical to vegetable valleys museum There are a few differences one the enemy is different with the final version having a sword knight giving you the sword ability obviously And if you didn't know that the sword wielding enemy would give you the sword ability you've also got that Huge picture above it saying sword, so it's pretty obvious. What ability you get? Except it's not completely obvious in this unused room since its ability picture is missing in fact Every unused museum is missing those pictures as well, but I'm done ahead of myself the last difference You should notice in this room Is that the Pedestal is higher than the final version you know it's weird though when you exit this room It actually takes you to the door for orange ocean's quick draw game so perhaps This was where the museum was supposed to be at first, but was replaced with that quick draw minigame Or it could also just be a coincidence He never quite know Let's move on to the next room number one five this one has a pengy which gives you the ice ability and another chilly This room is incredibly similar to great Gardens Museum and layout But the colors can be much different in some parts of the room Plus the two enemies shown off are different from the final two and once again the petal stools are higher in this unused room Now when you decide to head through that exit door for some reason you're taken to ice cream Island arena door Once again alluding to a possible location for this unused newseum now It's time for room one six old boy this one happens to be identical in every way to butter building museum But instead of giving you a star man that has a high jump ability it's a twister enemy that gives you the tornado move was actually found in yogurt yards museum in the final game the sun you stage exits in the Air above grave Gardens Crane game an Unusual place unless originally there used to be a museum door up there or once again Coincidence room 1 7 the next unused Museum is almost exactly the same as yogurt yards Museum It's got the same layout and colors. They both have a rocky enemy that gives you the stone ability though They are different colors and in fact the unused room even exits right above yoga yard Museum However this Sparky enemy was replaced with the twister enemy in the retail version turns out though This is the only museum where the Sparky enemy is found No, other level in the final game uses this poor sparky in their museum. Oh poor guy ok now we've got one last unused museum room room 1 3 6 Which is almost an exact duplicate of the onion museum room 1 4 except this one has sort Kimbley instead of a chili or Technically not see it's using circular Sprites, but really it's a toga Zone which gives you the needle Also, it's hovering in Midair So that's that's kind of a thing the most interesting thing about this room is the exit location for some strange reason Every time you exit this room you end up spawning right over the last hidden switch you hit So if you hit the one in Stage seven six left You'll go there, and if you hit five four switch after that you'll head to five four instead Why I have no idea, and it's a very strange functionality have which makes me. Think it was intended So maybe this was like a debug room to reach switches or maybe it really is just a coding bug Really you can't be quite sure turns out the room right after this one room one three seven is another unused area Except this one isn't a museum. It's an arena Despite being unused oh there actually aren't that many differences and most of them are fairly obvious First Mister Frosty is a blue so he isn't using that green palette that seemed in the final arena the crowd also refuses to move bunch of jerks and Not to mention. There's no maximum tomato that appears after the battles won. So there's no reward for even winning Except for the satisfaction of a hard day's work Leaving the arena actually takes kirby to grey Gardens Arena which houses bugsy in the final game, not Mr. Frosty so perhaps, Mr. Frosty was originally meant for level fours arena instead of level Twos Up next we've got two puzzle rooms that didn't quite make the cut but still work perfectly Yes The first room is room 145 and the goal as with all other cannon puzzles is to get the fuse lit and jump into the cannon before it fires in This unused room though in order to solve the puzzle You've got to pound down the steak with the hammer ability then before the ice box is created to block the lasers path Inhale the laser Ball feel its ability shoot at this slope Which will bounce the laser and light the fuse then all you've got to do is jump into the cannon before it fires easy peasy Livin squeezed lee if you do eventually get to that cannon in time You'll be transported to another unused puzzle room or you know you could technically take that door, too It takes you the same place, but you know I might call you do you Speaking of that next puzzle room. It's number one for six and this time There's no cannons to be found just two sticks that you'll have to hit sadly though There's no reward to doing this puzzle It looks like there would have originally been something in this hole in the ice like a 1up or something But it's not there now in order to solve this puzzle You've got to hit the spike on the top which will destroy a bunch of ice blocks allowing the prize to fall potentially into this bottomless pit So you've got a run down there as fast as possible to grab the reward before it falls into endlessness That's it, but I'm sure you're wondering what that stick below does turns out it does nothing, but Destroy the box below it killing you Literally, that's all it's used for killing me Next let's take a look at some incredibly interesting debug rooms starting with room A8 an actual hot stage for all The rest of those debug rooms the first thing that caught my eye here are these ladder pieces just above the bottom doors turns out these pieces actually represent each of the doors numbers in Binary with the bottom piece being one the middle being two and the top being four Unsurprisingly if you add them all up from left to right the doors are numbered one through seven however door six and seven don't work Meaning that the rooms. They were likely attached to were removed sometime throughout development The rest of them work very well though oh and not to mention There's that door on the top left which believe or not leads to another hobby room this one has eight doors Though an entirely different and very nice looking room I must say going through each of these reveals that they lead to the hubs for each of the seven levels in the game for example that door on the top left leads to level 1 Vegetable Valley the One below that is level 5 yogurtland and the bottom right door Well actually that one does not work something that would have led back to the main debug hub of which I agree is very likely but for whatever reason. There's no link now so at this point Why don't we head back and check out each of those rooms and the debug hubs starting from left to right? The first one turns out to be the fountain of dreams Which is copied from the point it's shown after the credits but before the star Rod falls onto the fountain it's so much of a duplicate that even the music is exactly the same and Most agreed that this place was likely used for testing But it's unknown exactly how The next room over is actually a bunch of different rooms strung together by doors that eventually lead back to the Hub Turns out these aren't just some random rooms though They actually copied the exact layout of a few Meta knight rooms for example the first is a copy of level 4 5 the second level 5 for the next level 6 6 and then level 3 4 and Level 2 3 there are three more rooms that are shown after these but from what I can see They don't match any meta knight stage as you can see in the final game So perhaps there were going to be more that were scrapped all right next door this room should look very familiar to you as it's the same as the tutorial stage that shows up if you stay on the title screen for too long But while the rooms are the same the enemy sprites don't look quite right when you make it about halfway through That's because the tutorial is hard-coded to load different. Enemy Sprites starting with Peggy here Which if you play the stage instead looks like a poppy bros, Jr. Turning into a tomato and shooting eyeball See the thing is when playing the level normally the functionality to load different Enemy Sprites Halfway through a room is lost and thusly the new Sprites aren't loaded and the enemies look really strange like bugsy being a bunch of cannons with chopped up enemies By the way once you get to the end turns out the warp star doesn't take you to the tutorial Screen as it would if the computer was playing through the stage Instead it takes you to room 1 3 a a more difficult version of the Poppy Bros senior Mini boss well then again Not really because you just bounce around his room and then leave on the warp star just after getting there after that scene you're taking to the next room room number 1 3 Which is the same layout as the last room? But this time it's a harder version of the rolling turtle mini box The problem is the star takes you right below the sage thusly killing you, but it's fine everything's fine you just respond back in this room and Actually those rooms the ones we just talked about there's actually a lot more to learn about them because there are actually four of them They all look the same with that whacked-out background, but you should some have a different more difficult version of a specific mini box The first is bugsy then poppy bros senior Rolling turtle and lastly Mr.. Tick tock Specifically in that order heading through the doors in each room will take you to the next boss except for the last one which leads you all the way back to the debug hub and it turns out you can actually get to The first of these rooms with bugsy by heading into door number five in the Hub No You know what you're probably wondering what door number four goes to because I just skipped it well actually That heads to that cannon puzzle we talked about earlier so coming around nicely isn't it one neat little package well We've gotten through all of those unused rooms last but not least we've got an unused song that we've just got to listen to it Actually happens to be a quote-unquote Remastered version of the original Kirby's dreamland theme from the Gameboy I say we listen to both the original and the onions remastered version and compare the quality shall, we So that's the development of Kirby's Dreamland, and Kirby's adventure I just want to say thank you all so much for watching and especially thank you to Arvid Olsen He's the guy who orchestrated the Kirby's adventure soundtrack those used in this video it sounds fantastic I have a link right Right here right around this part which brings you to a playlist of all the songs that was used in the video Check them out. They're great put them on your phone listen up while working out do whatever you want I also want to say another thing we have a second channel and by we I mean me she says and April start we've all just born this channel called game club podcast. It's a great place We take a week to play a video game. We review it in a podcast color format on 50 minutes It's basically your weekly 50-minute fix of all of us together Into one lovely little channel so guys I just want to say that we got a great month plan for Beta 64 Next week I have an interview with the voice of GLaDOS yeah, Ellen McLain She talked to me little old me She talked to me and we talked all about the development of portal we talked about how she got into voice acting Get excited for that. There's a lot of good stuff including some stuff that may never been known before Mm-Hmm Anyway, thanks everyone. There's links over here to more videos. There's a link over here to my channel if you want to scruple if you want to do that. That's great I'm going to leave. Thank you all for watching. I'll see you next time!
