By 1993 the NES was supposed to be finished. The SNES had been out for two years. Then Kirby's Adventure arrived and made the old hardware sing.

It was Kirby's console debut and the first game with the copy ability that has defined him ever since. The Game Boy original could only inhale and spit. Here, swallowing an enemy gives you its power, and there are more than twenty of them: fire, ice, the sword, the hammer, the parasol, the UFO, the wheel. Each one is a real moveset rather than a palette swap, and several of them break stages open in ways the level design clearly anticipates.

It's also the game that established Kirby's difficulty philosophy, which is deliberate and often misread. Kirby can float indefinitely, so falling into a pit is nearly impossible, and the main path is gentle on purpose. The actual game is the hunt: switches that open hidden doors, the museums where you can pick up abilities, the minigames, and the completion percentage that only moves if you've found everything.

The showstopper is the presentation. Parallax scrolling in several layers, a pseudo-3D rotating effect on the boss doors, palette cycling for water and clouds, sprite scaling the NES has no business doing, and animation frames spent freely on things that don't matter. HAL squeezed this out of the same processor that ran Super Mario Bros. eight years earlier, and the cartridge is 6 megabits, one of the largest the console ever got.

The cost was time. It took roughly three years and the SNES came out in the middle of it, and HAL shipped it anyway.

There's something poetic about one of the prettiest NES games being one of its last. A reminder that hardware limits are mostly a dare to clever developers.