A spontaneous failure in the keyboard or mouse can be a real headache for anyone who needs to work on a computer, but what happens when the absence of a keyboard is mandatory? What kind of platform limits a developer so much? In the case of Masahiro Sakurai, director of Kirby's Dream Land for Game Boy, what he used as a development kit was a Twin Famicom console, and the main input device... was a trackball. Yes.
We all have little horror stories involving computers. Pressing "Play" and waiting ten minutes (or more!) for the datasette to load our games on the Commodore 64. Changing jumpers to free up IRQ conflicts, exploring advanced commands in MemMaker searching for a few extra kilobytes of low memory, fighting with SimCGA and forcing graphics on Hercules monitors... ugh.
Some things definitely belong in the past and should be invoked as mere anecdotes, but there are people who had it even worse in some way. One of those people is Masahiro Sakurai, developer at HAL Laboratory (one of Nintendo's 'pillars') and creator of Kirby's Dream Land for Game Boy. The game turned 25, and as a celebration Sakurai shared details about that work, starting with the fact that he did not use a keyboard during programming.
The article published in Game Watch and translated by the folks at Source Gaming reveals that Sakurai used a Twin Famicom console as a development kit. The console was manufactured by Sharp under a Nintendo license, and combined the original Famicom hardware with the FDS unit in a single casing. The main tool was called Game Maker, made by HAL Laboratory to shape the 1991 title Metal Slader Glory.
According to Sakurai himself, "they prepared lunches with a lunchbox." The total data at his disposal was about 512 kilobits (64 kilobytes), and that limitation demanded significant resource reuse, as well as hexadecimal programming.
To top it off, the Twin Famicom had no keyboard compatibility, and the only additional device was a trackball. Imagine a 20-year-old programmer moving a trackball and entering commands on a virtual keyboard, whose result was one of the best games in the Game Boy Top 20. Sakurai didn't complain, and simply thought that was "the way it was done." A genius, but we don't envy him even a little.
