Fresh details emerge on cancelled Kid Kirby SNES game

Kid Kirby, originally planned for the SNES, is a cancelled Nintendo game we’ve previously known little of. Now, fresh details have come to light showing a little more of what could have been, had this project come to fruition.

Details shared by the Kid Kirby Archive Twitter include manual pages, a story overview and new renders, all of which were provided by writer Steve Hammond.

Digital Foundry’s Kirby and the Forgotten Land tech review.

First off, we have a render of King Dedede, a character only previously seen in much lower quality on a 1995 internal brochure.

“According to Steve, he was named Prince Dedede in Kid Kirby, not quite a king just yet. This is also the only known render to have been created by Nintendo of America,” Kid Kirby Archive explained.


Render of Prince Dedede in Kid Kirby (via Kid Kirby Archive).

Next up is a “1995 sketch illustrated by Steve, depicting early ideas for Kirby showing off a control scheme and also a concept for Kirby’s KidspeakTM, a reference to alien languages seen in Marvel Comics where Kirby would communicate in the manual through fruit and vegetables”.


A 1995 sketch illustrated by Steve Hammond for Kid Kirby (via Kid Kirby Archive).

Meanwhile, the manual images shared by Hammond cover several of its pages.

As noted by Kid Kirby Archive, the manual’s fourth page has a “never-before-seen logo” for the game, while its seventh page “includes some cheeky 90s satire in the newspaper clipping”. There is also an example of Kirby Kidspeak in use.


Pages 4 and 5 of Kid Kirby manual (via Kid Kirby Archive).

Pages 6 and 7 of Kid Kirby manual (via Kid Kirby Archive).

Kid Kirby Archive also shared a PDF of the in-game story for Kid Kirby, and thanked Hammond for his cooperation: “This is not just a step forward for the preservation of this project – this is a massive *leap* forward!”

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