Kid Icarus Trivia & Easter Eggs

Kid Icarus: Behind the Myth

Kid Icarus arrived on the Famicom Disk System in December 1986 as one of Nintendo R&D1’s most ambitious original properties, blending Greek mythology with side-scrolling action in a way no game had attempted before. Though it sold respectably at launch, it spent decades as a cult curiosity before a surprise revival turned Pit into a bona fide Nintendo icon. The game’s development history is as layered and surprising as the labyrinthine dungeons Pit climbs through.

Born Alongside Metroid: Two Games, One Team

Kid Icarus and Metroid were developed concurrently by the same core team at Nintendo R&D1, supervised by legendary designer Gunpei Yokoi and directed by Satoru Okada. This dual development was not a coincidence — Nintendo deliberately wanted to explore two distinct directions with a shared technical foundation. Both games were built on essentially the same engine, which is why a trained eye can spot structural similarities in how rooms scroll, how enemies behave, and how the world is partitioned into discrete sections. The teams shared resources, code, and institutional knowledge in real time. It is a remarkable historical footnote that two of Nintendo’s most tonally different franchises — the grim sci-fi loneliness of Metroid and the sunlit mythological adventure of Kid Icarus — were being assembled in adjacent rooms by overlapping groups of developers. Both shipped in Japan in 1986, representing a remarkable simultaneous output from a single division.

”Palutena’s Mirror”: The Japanese Title That Tells a Different Story

Western players know this game as Kid Icarus, but in Japan it launched under the title 光神話 パルテナの鏡 — transliterated as Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami, meaning “Light Mythology: Palutena’s Mirror.” That title centers the narrative on the goddess of light, Palutena, and frames the story as mythology rather than the adventure-game branding Nintendo of America favored. The Western title “Kid Icarus” was a marketing invention that leaned into the then-fashionable naming convention of preceding a hero’s name with “Kid” — a nod to American audiences who might connect a winged boy archer with the myth of Icarus. The character himself is named Pit in both regions, a name that has no direct mythological parallel and was chosen by the Japanese development team. This naming split — Palutena’s game in Japan, Icarus’s game in the West — reflects broader localization philosophies of the era, where Nintendo of America frequently repackaged Japanese games with more immediately recognizable Western hooks.

The Famicom Disk System Gave Japan a Better Game

The original Japanese release ran on the Famicom Disk System, Nintendo’s floppy disk peripheral, and this hardware difference had meaningful gameplay consequences. The FDS offered rewritable storage, which meant Japanese players could save their progress directly to the disk at any point. When Nintendo of America ported Kid Icarus to the NES cartridge format for Western release in 1987, that save functionality was gone — cartridges at the time did not include battery-backed SRAM as standard for this tier of game. Instead, Nintendo implemented a password system. Players who died or quit had to write down a lengthy alphanumeric string to restore their place, a far more friction-heavy experience than the Japanese version offered. The FDS hardware also had marginally different audio characteristics owing to its custom sound chip, meaning the Japanese soundtrack has subtle tonal differences from what Western audiences heard through standard NES audio hardware.

A Difficulty Curve Designed Backwards on Purpose

Kid Icarus is famous — some would say notorious — for its inverted difficulty arc. The game opens with brutal verticality: Pit starts at the bottom of a scrolling fortress and must climb upward, and falling below the screen kills him instantly. Enemies swarm, rooms are tight, and health upgrades are sparse. By contrast, the later Sky World palace stages and the final confrontation with Medusa are considerably more forgiving by most players’ assessments. This was not an oversight. The design philosophy, consistent with certain Nintendo R&D1 titles of the era, deliberately front-loaded challenge to create a sense of earned progression. As Pit collects hearts, upgrades his bow, and increases his health meter through defeated Centurions, the same early stages that punished beginners become manageable. The game rewards mastery and persistence by literally reshaping its own difficulty around the player’s growing power. Whether this was good design or miscalibrated difficulty has been debated by players for nearly four decades.

The Eggplant Wizard: Gaming’s Most Sadistic Curse

Among all of Kid Icarus’s enemies, none achieved the cultural notoriety of the Eggplant Wizard. These purple-robed sorcerers inhabit the game’s fortress stages and fire projectiles that transform Pit’s body into an eggplant from the neck down — leaving only his head visible. In this state, Pit cannot attack, cannot use items, and is essentially defenseless. The only cure is reaching a hospital room, which must be found in the same dungeon. If no hospital room exists nearby, or if the player cannot navigate to one without being able to fight, the run is functionally over. The enemy became so iconic that it was adapted into the Captain N: The Game Master animated television series (1989–1991), where Eggplant Wizard appeared as a recurring comedic villain alongside King Hippo. That animated interpretation introduced the character to millions of children who had never touched an NES, cementing the Eggplant Wizard as one of the era’s most recognizable Nintendo side characters.

Hidden Shops, Hot Springs, and the Black Market

Kid Icarus rewards exploration with a suite of hidden rooms tucked behind false walls and unmarked passages. The most practically valuable are the “black market” shops, concealed rooms where merchants sell powerful items that are unavailable through standard gameplay progression. These rooms were discovered through experimentation rather than any in-game hint — players who hammered attack buttons against specific wall tiles discovered they could pass through. Equally beloved are the hot spring rooms: hidden chambers where Pit can soak to restore health, represented by a cheerful bathing animation. The game also includes a “Training Dojo” where Pit can grind experience and Heart currency. These secrets were disseminated through Nintendo Power magazine and schoolyard word-of-mouth in an era before internet guides, making their discovery a genuine cultural event for players of the time. The layered nature of these secrets gave Kid Icarus unusual replay value for a 1986 platformer.

Two Decades of Dormancy and a Smash Bros. Resurrection

After Kid Icarus, Pit effectively vanished from Nintendo’s active roster. A Game Boy sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, arrived in 1991 and was quietly received, after which the franchise went dormant for seventeen years. Pit’s revival came not through a new standalone game but through Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008), where director Masahiro Sakurai selected him as a new fighter. Sakurai’s decision was reportedly driven by his belief that Pit had strong visual and gameplay potential that had gone underexplored, and by a desire to bring back a recognizable but long-absent Nintendo character. Pit’s inclusion in Brawl reintroduced him to an entire generation that had no memory of the NES original, and the response was strong enough to greenlight what fans had wanted for nearly two decades.

Kid Icarus: Uprising and the 26-Year Wait

Kid Icarus: Uprising launched on the Nintendo 3DS in March 2012 — twenty-one years after Of Myths and Monsters and twenty-six years after the original. Masahiro Sakurai himself directed the project through his studio Project Sora, formed specifically for the game. Sakurai’s involvement meant Uprising bore his distinctive stamp: dense systemic depth, extensive voice acting, fourth-wall-breaking humor, and a narrative that openly acknowledged and satirized the franchise’s long absence. The game’s dialogue frequently jokes about how long players had been waiting. Uprising was critically acclaimed, praised especially for its writing and content volume, though its single-stick control scheme — a compromise for the original 3DS hardware — drew ergonomic complaints. Masahiro Sakurai has since noted the physical toll the game’s development took on him, and no further Kid Icarus title has been announced since, leaving Uprising as the franchise’s unlikely and unlikely-to-be-topped high point.