It was all wildly ambitious for the time.
Nintendo was able to pull this off by purchasing around one-fifth of satellite music broadcaster St.GIGA, and dedicating blocks of their day specifically to the Satellaview service. Games weren’t the only thing on the service, either: there were demos, digital magazines, and tournaments for specific games, with prizes for the winners. Yes, software avatars and satellite broadcasting that made for enhanced audio-assuming you played the game at the time that those SoundLink broadcasts were happening, anyway. Nintendo was plenty busy, too, with an episodic Fire Emblem prequel, a Famicom Detective Club spin-off, and a remake of the original The Legend of Zelda where you played as the Satellaview’s software avatars dressed as Link, where an orchestral soundtrack played due to the SoundLink broadcast technology the satellite system could utilize. Falcom put a version of Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes on the service in 1995. Harvest Moon received an episodic gaiden across a few weeks in September of 1996. Squaresoft developed and published the link between Chrono Trigger and the eventual Chrono Cross on Satellaview, a visual novel adventure called Radical Dreamers. It was a space for well-known series or popular games to release smaller spin-off titles, or do a bit of experimentation. Released in 1995 in Japan, it would temporarily distribute games that were broadcast over this network, and you could either save them to the Satellaview memory itself, or to 8-megabit memory cards. The Satellaview was a Super Famicom peripheral that, as the name implies, utilized a satellite system. Which means the only Kirby title to never have any presence at all outside of Japan is Kirby no Omocha Hako, translated to Kirby’s Toy Box, and that’s because the hardware that it played on never left Japan, either. That game was just a console remake/enhanced port of the internationally released Game Boy title, Kirby’s Star Stacker, however, and if you really want to play it legally in the present, you can create a Japanese Switch account, and sign up for that region’s version of Nintendo Switch Online.
Kirby no Kirakira Kizzu, or Kirby’s Super Star Stacker, released in Japan after Nintendo of America had already stopped publishing SNES titles.
Even with this history, though, not every title in the franchise has made its way out of Japan. The first game in the series was originally going to be known as Twinkle Popo-there was even box art made up saying as much-before Nintendo intervened and asked HAL Laboratory to rename it to something North Americans might buy instead. Kirby has been around for 30 years now, and international audiences have always been a focus.
0 kommentar(er)
