A canceled SNES Kirby game has finally been made playable and is free to download

A long-lost Kirby game that Nintendo canceled back in the mid-1990s has been fully recreated by a fan and is now playable for free on PC, more than three decades after its original development team quietly moved on to create Grand Theft Auto.

A three-decade-old odyssey?

Kid Kirby was in development around 1994 and 1995 at DMA Design, the Scottish studio behind Lemmings that later rebranded as Rockstar North. The game was designed specifically around the Super NES Mouse, the peripheral Nintendo bundled with Mario Paint in 1992, with gameplay built around dragging and flinging a younger version of Kirby across each level in a style not far removed from a rudimentary version of Kirby Mass Attack.

Nintendo pulled the plug after development dragged on far longer than planned, compounded by weak sales of the SNES Mouse and reports that the game simply didn't play well when adapted to a standard controller. Ex-DMA developer Mike Dailly later said Nintendo had grown "fed up with the game" by the time it was scrapped. Had it come out, Kid Kirby would have been the only mainline Kirby title ever developed outside Japan.

A free-to-play release

The fan recreation, built by a developer going by novastar86b and released free on itch.io, isn't a recompilation pulled from leaked source code, but an independent reconstruction built from scratch using whatever surviving documentation, artwork, and gameplay descriptions have surfaced over the years. It includes eight levels and a single boss fight, with each stage introducing a new mechanic to keep things from feeling repetitive.

Enemies drop copy abilities when defeated, activated with Right Click or Space, though only one can be held at a time, and timed abilities like Beam and Parasol run for 10 seconds by default unless canceled early. Movement uses simple slap and slam moves rather than a mouse-flinging control scheme, and the recreation adds its own twist: a paper airplane transformation directly inspired by the one in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, tilting up for height and down for speed.

Much of what's known about Kid Kirby's original design only came to light in recent years thanks to the fan-run Kid Kirby Archive account on X, which has spent time since 2022 tracking down manual scans, concept art, and first-hand accounts from former DMA staff. The full recreation is now available to download on itch.io, giving players their first real chance to experience a piece of Kirby history that was never supposed to exist outside magazine scans and secondhand memories.

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