In 1994 Nintendo handed Scotland’s DMA Design a Kirby license and a Super NES Mouse and asked the studio to make a prequel. DMA was already known for Lemmings and Uniracers and would, two years later, ship Grand Theft Auto. Kid Kirby started even earlier as a golf-style mouse prototype from freelancer Tony Colgan, then became a stretch-and-launch blob called Jellies before Nintendo suggested the pink puffball.

Inkbox spent two years writing every instruction of Zero Star by hand in 65c816 assembly so a Super Nintendo from 1990 could run a dungeon crawler of his own design. The result sits on itch.io as a 129-kilobyte ROM you load in Mesen or bsnes, pay what you want, and play tonight. Mountains of an imagined far east rise in shifting mazes. You climb them, throw talismans, and cut through flocks of jungle fowl until the counters on screen run out of room.

Nintendo almost never hands another company the keys to its hardware. In July 1986 Sharp walked out of that arrangement with a Japan-only console that stuffed a Family Computer and a Family Computer Disk System into one box and charged ¥32,000 for the privilege, more than buying both Nintendo units separately. Sharp already had a working relationship with Nintendo through Game & Watch production and a Famicom built into a television, and Sharp even held an older “Famicon” trademark from a convection oven. That history, plus a license, produced the Twin Famicom: a 60-pin cartridge slot, a disk-card slot with a yellow eject button, and a switch under the cartridge bay that locked one format while the other ran.

Nintendo revealed Metroid Ravenous in its September Direct and set a firm date of January 28, 2027, exclusive to Switch 2. Samus Aran is already hurt when the story starts. Unknown attackers drain her energy on an alien moon, then send her tumbling into desert sand. She has to claw her way back to the surface first. Getting off the moon comes second, and the odds look thin.