Nintendo and HAL struggled to make a mainline 3D Kirby game for around 20 years
Nintendo and HAL Laboratory struggled for around two decades to make a 3D Kirby game, a new interview has revealed.
In an ‘Ask the Developer’ interview published on Nintendo’s website, Kirby and the Forgotten Land general director Shinya Kumazaki explained the long road it took both companies to reach the first mainline 3D game in the series.
Kumazaki, who’s been involved with the Kirby series at HAL Laboratory for 20 years, explained: “Looking back on the history of the Kirby series, there was a period of time where certain game concepts simply refused to come together.”
The article then cites an older 2011 interview with the late Satoru Iwata, the former HAL and Nintendo president, in which it was revealed that after the release of Kirby 64 in 2000, the team made three ‘lost games’ that were never released, one of which was a 3D title.
In the 2011 interview, producer Shigefumi Kawase said this game “was an experiment with extremely challenging gameplay that placed Kirby in 3D space and allowed players to move around freely. But unfortunately, we weren’t able to achieve the quality we hoped for and it never reached completion.”
In the new interview, Kumazaki explained that the journey to make a 3D Kirby continued to the present day, with prototypes and smaller games (such as Kirby’s Air Ride on the GameCube and Kirby’s Blowout Blast on the 3DS) being made to test how a mainline 3D Kirby game could work.
“We kept hitting walls we couldn’t climb over,” Kumazaki said. “From [2000] on, our game prototypes shifted to a ‘trial-and-error’ approach. We played with unconventional gameplay angles through comparatively smaller games in the series as a way to further explore the concept of a Kirby-based 3D platformer.
“We still had plenty
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