Feature
How the pink little thing was once a placeholder, saved the fate of his makers, and became Nintendo’s next great mascot.
Kirby’s latest adventure, Kirby’s Epic Yarn for Wii, has a bit in common with the pink puffball’s initial videogame foray, the Game Boy title Kirby’s Dream Land from way back in 1992. For one thing, both games were originally planned to star different characters. Epic Yarn was first conceived as “World of Fluff” by the development team at Good Feel, was supposed to star Prince Fluff, who eventually became Kirby’s cohort in the final product. Kirby’s Dream Land (and indeed, the whole Kirby franchise as we know it) began with the idea of a hero character named Popopo, and from there, it’s a more complicated past that ties into how Kirby came to be.
Originally, the concept of Kirby started life as a self-published game from original Kirby developers HAL Laboratory — and it was to be called Tinkle Popo (or Twinkle Popo), set for release on the Game Boy in early 1991. At the time, HAL, who had Satoru Iwata (Nintendo’s current president) on the board of directors, was dealing with a financial crisis that saw the company a year away from declaring themselves bankrupt.
