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New footage of an obscure Kirby GameCube project is prompting delight from the flying puffball’s faithful all around the world.
Only one Kirby game ever made it out on GameCube, and that was the 2003 multiplayer racer Kirby Air Ride. However, bits and pieces of other projects which never made it out of development have also emerged over the years, with fans collectively referring to this era of Kirby history as Kirby GCN. Now a new video pulled from recordings of Nintendo’s E3 2005 booth provides the best look yet at one of these lost Kirby titles.
Across roughly eight seconds of off-screen video, we see Kirby dueling with a foe in what appears to be a reaction-based volleying minigame, a 2.5D platforming segment on the deck of Meta Knight’s Halberd airship, and King Dedede at the controls of a giant fighting robot. It isn’t much, but compared to the handful of still images and bullet points fans had managed to find for this project previously, it’s everything.
Almost as interesting as the material itself is its provenance. This snippet of video was pulled from a longer look at Nintendo’s E3 2005 booth, which was itself a portion of a Nintendo France press kit video recently archived from the original Betacam tape by PeerTube user fenarinarsa. This artifact of a Kirby game once thought lost had been waiting in official Nintendo materials the whole time, ready to be rediscovered by vigilant fans a decade and a half later.
While we can only hope to see more of this piece of Kirby’s past, we were very excited to recently see more of Kirby and the Forgotten Land ahead of its arrival in March.
I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University – though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I’ve previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I’m a staff writer here at GamesRadar.
