This throwback got me thinking, when did I start my Nintendo gaming career? I cannot remember if we first got the Super Nintendo in our house (it launched in 1992) or that it was the Game Boy which I got when I was 8 years old (so that was 1994 for me). Both are a long time ago but I still have vivid memories of playing those machines. The timeline is a bit blurry though.

The Game Boy at least was the device that really got me into gaming. The countless hours I played that grey brick, I don’t want to know how many sets of batteries it must have cost. Although I did get a power pack for it later. And that click-on magnifying glass with the light in it. Oh, the good times, that thing weight a lot with everything attached!

Two paragraphs in my TBT and I am already drifting off further than a Squishy at open sea. The first games I got on my Game Boy were Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Kirby’s Dream Land. They were the only games in my possession for a while so I played them again and again and again. It is something I cannot imagine doing anymore; playing a game from beginning to end for so many times. Naturally things have changed. Games are usually much longer these days and there is more different content to play across a number of platforms.

But still, I must have played and finished Kirby’s Dream Land more than 25 times, if not more. It is a game that can easily be completed within the hour. In fact, it may be the game that I perfected the most, so who knows, maybe I should freshen up my Kirby skills and see if I can get a good speedrun time on it!

Why did I play Kirby’s Dream Land so often, and why did I kept returning to it? And why is it popping up in my mind nowadays again? Since in retrospect, the game was not that impressive. As I said before the game is short. It takes you across five worlds, where in the last world you take on your nemesis King Dedede in a boxing ring. Sounds almost like a Super Smash game! The other worlds use a lot of themes and enemies which we find back in later Kirby games. Think of Whispy Woods which you can tackle now in the Kirby Star Allies demo.

The game is also missing a very important element which is only introduced in the NES follow-up Kirby’s Adventure: Kirby’s copy ability. In Kirby’s Dream Land you can suck up enemies, swallow them or spit them out and puff up to fly. But copying was not yet on Kirby’s resume. What the game did right however is introduce one of Nintendo’s greatest characters, who can fly, eat foes and does a dance after completing a level. Not bad for a character model that was initially only a place filler for a different protagonist. Game designer Masahiro Sakurai liked the little blob however and stuck with it.

At that time it offered plenty of gameplay elements to be interesting such as gobbling up foes or flying. Add to that the great soundtrack (I always got excited to hear the tune when picking up a hyper lollipop) and the small bits of humour in the cutscenes and you have a winning formula.

Yes, I replayed the game a lot because I did not have much games yet. The game’s low difficulty also made it the perfect game for starting a gaming career. But later on when my backlog got bigger I still returned to Kirby’s Dream Land now and then to hear those tunes again. What also helped was the Extra Mode. By pushing ↑, A, and Select on the title screen you can play a more difficult version of the game which replaces the original cast of enemies with a different, more dangerous one.

I enjoyed a lot of great Kirby games, from platformers such as Kirby’s Adventure to the more quirky titles such as Kirby Power Paintbrush for the Nintendo DS. In Super Smash Bros. the pink puffball is one of my favourite characters. But all that Kirby love (and heck, maybe even my love for Nintendo) started with this title: Kirby’s Dream Land.