How Kid Icarus shows us the fiendish difficulty of game development
Kid Icarus (1987)
Kid Icarus (1987)
Look, we’re all man or woman enough to admit it: when we were daydreamers, back in idyllic times, long before any ambition or aspirations we may have had were crushed beneath the indiscriminate gold-tasselled boot of the ultra-capitalist bourgeoisie, we wanted to make our own video games.
It seemed like the absolute dream job. Our wish to be the brainchild behind Super Mario Bros. 9, to be the one who would soak up all the plaudits, it was a wish that took real pride of place in our list of unlikely careers, alongside astronaut… rock star… Hollywood actor… or in my own tragic case, my desire to be a mega-paid hand-model. With some fast-food tasting on the side.
We know now that it’s just about futile and impossible to make any kind of vocation fun, even when it involves our own hobbies. In fact, that’s probably the quickest way to make yourself hate something – depend on it for a living, while having to put up with incompetence all around you, maybe even having to report to some obstinate fool above you.
Experience in the real world, impossible bureaucracy and ruthless next-quarter have all come together and taught us the needlessly harsh lesson - even a job in game development is fraught with terribly stressful risk.
You might really strike the jackpot and get a cushty job with Nintendo, making some Mario sports game that, at worst, will just leave fans mildly disappointed. But for the most part, you can probably strap yourself in for months upon months of testing the same areas of some mediocre iOS game that your superior has come up with, before reporting on your dismal progress in a series of mind-crushingly dull meetings.
The shameful excuse for a game you’ve thrown up is now due for release, although by this stage, seppuku has crossed your mind a dozen times. You don’t go through with it (this time), and your game is released to those worst kind of reviews – average ones.
You had already written off any and all chance that this game you’d painstakingly given two years of your life to could be one of the greats; you were just left hoping that it wouldn’t be savaged by the critics. Now, though, with everyone reacting to your latest creative work with a collective shrug, you’re beginning to wish you hadn’t bothered.
Maybe you shouldn’t have re-emerged from under those coats, the ones you hid under that one weekend when things really came crashing down. The weekend when some oaf vomited all over the original concept art, or when the collision detection programming was found to damaged so badly even Bill Gates couldn’t repair it.
Even a Metacritic score of less than 20 would have been better for your game, because at least people actively buy bad games. But who wants to purchase mediocrity? Certainly not the little people, with all their little dollars.
In any case, your name is tarnished forever, if you were good enough to even have a name, and it’s a downgrade to Mahjong games and minor sports simulators for you – if you’re lucky. But hey, at least you can dust yourself down and try again, eh?
All of this is why, when I hear legions upon legions of unpleasable fans of the Super Smash Bros series screaming online threats, insults and cries for help at its leading man, Masahiro Sakurai, I can’t help but feel sorry for this mild gaming celebrity who I’ll never meet.
He has what appears to be an unenviable task: trying to keep about a zillion 12-year-olds happy. Now, you will have heard such 12-year-olds on online FPS games, I know you have. And you’ll recognise at once what an absolutely thankless task it is to keep their likes happy.
Still, the best he can do here is try to pander to fans of every series represented in Smash, by giving them all equal love as much as he possibly can. He does break this rule with Kirby sometimes, but that’s OK – he created Kirby, you know. That’s his pink baby.
But he really doesn’t help himself with the bias towards another series he’s become affiliated with, this being the decidedly average Kid Icarus. Even now, I see people clamouring for a re-release of Icarus Uprising for the 3DS, a game that was supposed to herald a grand return to the series and the renaissance of a true Nintendo hero.
Now, unlike those 12-year-olds who I always enjoy making myself feel superior to, I’m not naive enough to believe that Sakurai being the lead designer of a game means that all executive marketing decisions are down to him entirely.
Still, someone like Sakurai, with all his pedigree, tried his very best with the most recent Kid Icarus game, and it was still pretty poor, in my opinion. And this provokes an interesting experiment: why don’t we see where it all began for the Kid Icarus fella, and conclude whether or not he deserves any of the preferential treatment?
So we look at Kid Icarus for the NES. It was either that, or a thoroughly depressing Game Boy half-sequel to the original, which I reeeeeeaaaalllly couldn’t get my head together for. That one might be useful as a sedative, if you want to track down a copy.
In Kid Icarus for the NES, you play as Pit, the wannabe angel who must journey from the Underworld to the Overworld and become a fully-fledged celestial being. Along the way, he’ll also need to find some sacred treasures, before destroying the villain, Medusa. So you’re not even a proper angel to start off with, as evidenced by your character’s very poor controls, bad jumping ability and overall lack of strength.
Even the start of the game is a bit downbeat and miserable, as you struggle to haul angel butt up the vertically scrolling levels, each of them with a non-inspiring black background. You need to leap all the way up to the top of these labyrinths, and avoid falling down the bottomless pit (little pun for you there) that you’ve just created by scrolling the screen upwards.
It’s a little like how you couldn’t go backwards in the original Super Mario Bros., except if you tried to do it, touching the invisible wall would just make it get fed up and it would instantly kill you instead. I suppose that’s the only way they can really create bottomless pits, that much necessary staple of platform gaming, in a vertical scroller.
But it’s not as if they needed to make this game any harder. In Kid Icarus, you have two real choices of getting on by: one, you can try to limp up through the levels as pacifistically as possible, avoiding all fighting with the enemies, and you’ll find yourself sorely lacking in health and weaponry as a result.
Or two, you can stop and grind for hearts in every level, the hearts functioning as currency in this game. Grinding like this, you can build up a big enough points tally early on, just what you need to boost your health from the piddly little half-amount you start off with.
A platform game with grinding elements? Christ, no thanks. You’ve either got to sink a lot of time into moribund level after moribund level, each with hideously repetitive music droning on in the background. Or you can get through the levels in a quicker fashion, meaning you’ll suffer the game’s unforgiving difficulty as it never even so much as cracks a smile at you. What’s the point in that?
As for your character’s weapon, you’ll not believe it. Do you remember how, for the first 5 minutes of Metroid and Metroid Zero Mission, your beam travelled the length of a bee’s willy and you had to go find the Long Beam to get a bit of range? Well, the weak little arrows that Pit fires travel even shorter, the length of a… bee’s pube.
So you’re there trying to grind heart currency, from all kinds of flying enemies which are far more manoeuvrable than your angel in the making, and the whole challenge just puts you off. Kid Icarus is a game where you are constantly up against it, and the game’s lack of direction means things are hardly gonna get better, even when the action turns to a more conventional side-scrolling platformer.
Getting caught by a Grim Reaper enemy is probably the nadir of this whole package: his eyes bulge… he sends tough enemies after you… a truly awful cacophony begins playing which must be heard to be believed… beyond that, there’s those enemies that turn your head into an eggplant… stripping you of all your abilities and forcing you to backtrack… and… oh, what’s that?
In a fit of rage, you’ve ripped the game out of the console! You’ve fired an Arrow of Light through it! And you’ve put on a different NES game that didn’t decide to flout every platforming game convention known to man!
And so, Kid Icarus lay as a dormant, forgotten joke for years. It’s probably just a tiny bit better than something like Ice Climber, but that means absolutely nothing. If I programmed this game, I would be ashamed for my life. Sure, it’s easy to be a critic. But it would probably be even easier to program a game that’s better than Kid Icarus.
10 July 2026