Kid Kirby, The Cancelled SNES Game From Future GTA Devs, Is Revived 31 Years Later

In 1992, Nintendo launched the Super NES Mouse, a peripheral bundled with Mario Paint. To go with it, the Scottish studio DMA Design, which would become famous three years later as... Rockstar Games with the Grand Theft Auto series, worked on an adventure game called Kid Kirby. The title, which cast a younger version of Kirby on a quest to save Dream Land's Dream Spring using the mouse, was shelved in 1995 after disappointing sales of the peripheral.

Thirty-one years later, fan developer NovaStar has recreated the game using interviews, anecdotes and archival material publicly shared by former members of the original development team. The result, available for free on itch.io for Windows and Linux, is a physics-based maze game where you catapult young Kirby through all sorts of obstacles, unlocking several shape transformations along the way.

A lost game made playable again

This kind of recreation relies entirely on the community's collective memory and archival work: without testimony from the original developers, no playable trace of Kid Kirby would have survived to this day. The project joins the long list of cancelled 16-bit era games that owe their second life to preservation efforts led by fans rather than publishers themselves.

To install it, simply download the archive from the project's itch.io page, which also doubles as a getting-started guide with detailed controls.

Source: Time Extension