Kid Icarus

Overview

Kid Icarus arrived on the NES in December 1986 in Japan — the same day as Metroid, sharing both a development team and a sense of mythological ambition — and quietly became one of the platform’s most distinctive and divisive titles. Developed by Nintendo R&D1 under director Satoru Okada and producer Gunpei Yokoi, the game casts players as Pit, a young angel imprisoned in the Underworld after the goddess Palutena is overthrown by the serpentine Medusa. The premise is ripped from a loose interpretation of Greek mythology filtered through Nintendo’s imagination: sacred treasures, a Mirror of Palthena, centurion warriors turned to stone, and a hierarchy of gods and monsters rendered in vivid 8-bit detail.

What distinguishes Kid Icarus from its NES contemporaries is its structural ambition. The game opens as a vertical scroller — Pit climbing upward through labyrinthine underworld caverns — before transitioning into traditional side-scrolling territory across sky palaces and enemy fortresses. This shift in camera orientation mirrors Pit’s journey from trapped prisoner to empowered hero, and it works thematically as much as mechanically. Visually, the game deploys a warm palette of earthy browns and luminous blues, with sprite work that punches well above the hardware’s limitations. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka’s soundtrack is equally remarkable: the opening Underworld theme in particular is a driving, percussive composition that has lodged itself permanently in the memory of anyone who played it.

Upon its North American release in July 1987, Kid Icarus received a mixed critical response. Reviewers praised its ambition and depth but flagged its notorious difficulty as a significant barrier. Commercially it sold respectably, though it never matched the cultural dominance of Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo Power championed it throughout its early issues, helping sustain a loyal fanbase, but for years the game existed in an odd liminal space — beloved by those who played it, largely forgotten by mainstream gaming culture.

That changed gradually. Pit’s inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008 reintroduced the character to a generation that had never touched the original, and the eventual release of Kid Icarus: Uprising for Nintendo 3DS in 2012 — developed by Masahiro Sakurai’s Sora Ltd. — retroactively elevated the source material to franchise status. Today Kid Icarus is recognized as a genuine NES classic: a rough, demanding, deeply idiosyncratic game that rewards patience and encapsulates a particular strain of 1980s Nintendo design philosophy.

Gameplay

Kid Icarus is built around a core loop of combat, exploration, and incremental empowerment that borrows more from RPG conventions than most NES action games dared to attempt. Pit’s primary weapon is the Sacred Bow, which fires arrows in a straight horizontal line — serviceable but limited. The real mechanical depth comes from the game’s upgrade economy. Enemies drop Hearts, the game’s currency, which can be spent in hidden shops embedded within fortress walls. These shops sell Arrows, Torch items (which reveal hidden rooms), the Angel’s Feather (a limited flight item), and the Centurion, an ally who fights alongside Pit for a limited time. Mallets smash enemies into walls and occasionally reveal secret chambers. The Water of Life restores health. The layering of these systems onto a platforming foundation gives Kid Icarus a texture that feels almost proto-Metroidvania in its scope.

Permanent upgrades come from Sacred Chambers scattered throughout each world. Life Upgrades increase Pit’s maximum health, while Strength Upgrades amplify arrow damage. Critically, Pit begins the game severely underpowered — his health bar is a single unit and his arrows deal minimal damage. This is the source of Kid Icarus’s infamous difficulty. The opening vertical-scrolling stages are punishing by design: Pit must climb upward while dodging Monoeyes (flying cyclops enemies that track aggressively), Twinbellows-class creatures, and the dreaded Eggplant Wizards, enemies who transform Pit into an eggplant-headed figure incapable of attacking, forcing the player to seek out a dedicated Hospital room to be cured. Dying in the early game often sends Pit back to the bottom of the screen, making the climb feel genuinely oppressive.

Each of the game’s three worlds ends with a fortress — a labyrinthine dungeon stage played from a top-down-adjacent perspective in confined corridors. These sections test navigation and resource management, culminating in a boss encounter before advancing to the next world. The bosses — Twinbellows, Hewdraw, the Pandora-guarded final gauntlet — each demand specific patterns and timing. The fourth and final world, the Skyworld fortress, strips away the RPG economy entirely and demands pure execution. Players who have collected enough upgrades find this final stretch manageable; those who have not are brutalized. The game ends by rating Pit based on his total score, health, and collected items, assigning a rank and even transforming the ending sequence to reflect player performance — a remarkable accountability system for 1986.

Progression systems interact with difficulty in a way that rewards methodical players who backtrack, grind for Hearts, and locate hidden chambers. The game does not hold hands. Entrances to shops are concealed behind unmarked walls that must be struck with arrows to reveal. Sacred Chambers appear without signposting. Players who approach Kid Icarus with Super Mario Bros. expectations — run right, jump on things — will hit a wall within minutes. Those who approach it as a hybrid action-RPG, with patience and willingness to probe every surface, will find a game that opens steadily and generously.

Why It’s a Classic

Kid Icarus earns its classic status through a combination of design audacity and tonal coherence that few NES games achieved. Its decision to blend vertical and horizontal scrolling within a single narrative arc was not just technically interesting — it was expressive. The player’s relationship with gravity changes as Pit’s power grows, and the game uses camera orientation as a storytelling device long before the medium had developed a vocabulary for such things. The RPG-adjacent upgrade loop, meanwhile, is an early example of an action game acknowledging that empowerment is itself a form of entertainment: the feeling of Pit’s arrows cutting through enemies in the final world, after hours of being barely capable of survival, is genuinely earned in a way that linear action games of the era rarely achieved.

The game’s influence surfaces in unexpected places. The hybrid vertical-horizontal structure anticipates later action-platformers that segment worlds by feel and movement type. The hidden shop mechanic — strike walls, find commerce — echoes forward into countless dungeon crawlers. Sakurai’s Kid Icarus: Uprising directly credits the original’s irreverent mythology and punishing-then-rewarding difficulty curve as foundational to the reboot’s design philosophy. Hip Tanaka’s soundtrack, meanwhile, has been remixed, reimagined, and arranged hundreds of times in the decades since, a testament to compositions that were engineered to stick.

What makes Kid Icarus hold up today is precisely what made it divisive in 1987: it demands something specific from the player and refuses to apologize for that demand. In an era of increasingly accessible game design, there is something genuinely refreshing about a game that makes difficulty a structural argument — that says, plainly, you must earn this. Players willing to meet Kid Icarus on its terms will find a game of surprising depth, real atmosphere, and the particular satisfaction that only comes from conquering something that seemed impossible.