The Unsung Innovations of Kid Icarus

2011 was a year packed to overflowing with Nintendo anniversaries, as several of the company's properties and products hit major milestones. Zelda turned 25, as did Metroid. The GameCube hit 10 years, the N64 turned 15 and the SNES marked two full decades since its debut. Yet among all the different birthdays that were celebrated, there was one more that flew in under the radar right before the calendar flipped to 2012 - Kid Icarus.

Pit's original 8-bit adventure also had its 25th anniversary in 2011, debuting on Japan's Famicom Disk System as Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami on December 19, 1986. The American anniversary is still ahead of us - it won't happen until July of this year. But whether a little late or a few months early, now seems a great time to take a step back and celebrate the first adventure of Nintendo's now 25-year-old Kid.

One of the most immediately interesting aspects of Kid Icarus' gameplay design is the fact that its edges aren't barriers. Instead, in its vertically-scrolling stages, you can simply walk off one side of the screen and immediately pop back up on the opposite side. In traditional Nintendo fashion, the very first level teaches you how to handle this mechanic - placing Pit in a confined set of corridors and then offering an interesting door. Duck inside and the room is empty. So where should you go?

You go back outside and hop up on top of the door, your only other path to potential progress. Sure enough, the first instance of screen-edge warping happens before your eyes. It was a simple way for the designers to be more efficient with screen real estate at first, but later on becomes a devious challenge, when moving platforms carry you around the edge and back again and enemies swarm you from all angles while you navigate up, up and further up.

Kid Icarus wasn't the first game to employ wrap-around warping like this, of course - you can trace it as far back as Asteroids and Pac-Man in arcades, and earlier NES designs like Ice Climber, Wrecking Crew and Balloon Fight all used it too. But Kid Icarus was the link in the chain that brought the idea into action gaming, and its usage here inspired a more prominent series to feature it too - both Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3 had screen-edge warping in their own vertical levels.



So we've got side-to-side screen warping, but let's face it, that part of the original Kid Icarus probably isn't going to factor into the upcoming Uprising in any way. It's a bit too old-school and only works in 2D, unless you start getting into Portal territory.

What will play a role in the new 3DS sequel, though, are the other three types of stage layouts from the first Kid Icarus. See, the NES original was most known for its vertical levels, but there were actually four different types of level designs.

There were dungeons. One screen at a time, trap-filled mazes not unlike the labyrinths seen in the first Legend of Zelda - the only difference being that with Kid Icarus, you still kept a side-scrolling perspective on the action. These areas seem to inspire the interior spaces featured in Uprising, one of which was on display at last year's E3.


The NES Kid Icarus also had traditional, exterior side-scrolling stages in the style of left-to-right platformers like Super Mario Bros. or Castlevania. In vertical stages you had the screen warps to deal with and falling to your death was a constant worry, but in these side-scrolling worlds it was more often swarms of foes you had to deal with. These sequences are the closest analog to Uprising's ground-based "Land Battle" missions, when Pit descends from the sky and starts blasting his way through waves of Medusa's minions on the surface.


Finally and most importantly, the very last level of Kid Icarus 1 - which was presented as an auto-scrolling, free-flying shooter level. That same type of gameplay has been promoted to the main focus for Kid Icarus: Uprising's "Air Battle" portions, and some fans have been quick to call foul and say that such a thing is too dissimilar to the series' roots. Well, it's not. Pit equipped himself with the Three Sacred Treasures and actually flew with his wings in the finale of the NES title, a rare instance of Nintendo taking on the kind of gameplay that was more commonly associated with franchises like Konami's Gradius.



Beyond the original Kid Icarus' weird screen warps and variety of different stage structures, the key thing that still endures 25 years later is just how incredibly weird everything in Angel Land was. NES players had already seen Mario's world of floating bricks and magic mushrooms by the time Kid Icarus came around, along with tons of other examples of Nintendo ridiculousness in all of the company's other games. But Kid Icarus? This one was just wacky.

Take the Eggplant Wizard - a vegetable-themed sorcerer who can disable all of Pit's offensive abilities by encasing our hero's body inside a giant purple squash. Or how about the magic harp item? You pick it up and every enemy on the screen is instantly transformed into a hammer. Those hammers then turn around and let you smash apart stone statues, releasing Centurion allies who come to your aid in boss battles later.

There's also an enemy based on the Rolling Stones logo. The Credit Card item you can use to charge the purchase of equipment, then pay off the debt later. Even Metroids showed up in Kid Icarus, in Nintendo's first ever enemy cross-over between different series.

Even better than all the oddness in the 1986 game, though, is the fact that the 2012 one is bringing almost all of it back. We've already seen through trailers and our hands-on time with Uprising that the Eggplant Wizard is back, the Metroids and Micks are attacking again, the Centurions will star in the multiplayer mode and more.


Yes, Kid Icarus certainly had its fair share of unique and interesting innovations. And it's pretty cool that, for as different as Uprising looks, its design is going to pay homage to a lot of what made the original game so weird.


Lucas M. Thomas counts Kid Icarus as one of his favorite NES games, though when he replays it he sometimes still dies on Level 1. You can follow him on Twitter.

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