Kirby's Dream Land
The Game Boy game that introduced Kirby in the summer of 1992: inhale an enemy, swallow it or spit it back out as a star, and float over anything you can't beat. He was pink in Japan and white on the American box, and sold more than five million copies either way.
Masahiro Sakurai came up with Kirby around May 1990, at nineteen, while working at HAL Laboratory. The character started as a placeholder sprite that the team decided to keep, and the game went through working titles including "Twinkle Popo" before it got its final name. HAL had planned to publish it themselves and asked Nintendo in after weak pre-orders. "Kirby" came from a list of names supplied by Nintendo of America, partly in honor of John Kirby, the attorney who had defended Nintendo in court, and partly because a hard-sounding name on such a soft character struck the team as funny. Sakurai directed and drew the game, Jun Ishikawa scored it, and the programming was done on a Twin Famicom with a trackball and an on-screen keyboard.
It came out in Japan on April 27, 1992, in North America that August and in the UK in December. Kirby inhales enemies and projectiles and either swallows them or fires them back as stars, and can gulp air and fly indefinitely, though while airborne all he can do is let the air out. There are no copy abilities yet, only temporary power-ups; stealing an enemy's power arrived with Kirby's Adventure on the NES in 1993, a game released ten years after the Famicom itself, when most players had already moved on to 16-bit machines. Sakurai always meant Kirby to be pink, but the Game Boy's monochrome screen hid it, Shigeru Miyamoto assumed he was yellow, and Nintendo of America's box art painted him white to match what was on screen. Joystick magazine gave it 96 percent, Famitsu's four reviewers scored it 5, 5, 6 and 6 out of 10, and GameRankings later averaged it at 62 percent, 17th among Game Boy games.
None of that slowed it. More than a million copies had sold by March 1993, 4.6 million by 1997, and 5.13 million in all, which stood as the franchise's best until 2022. Kirby's Dream Land 2 followed in 1995 with the copy mechanic, Kirby has been a fighter in Super Smash Bros. since the first game in 1999, and the 100-episode anime Kirby: Right Back at Ya! aired in the US, licensed by 4Kids, from 2002 to 2006.
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