Kirby was named after a lawyer

Who are the most famous Nintendo characters of all time? Obviously Mario is at the top of that list and then perhaps Link from Zelda, then Samus from Metroid but somewhere in that list is Kirby, whose games I am familiar with but I must admit I have never played any of the games.

I don't know exactly why that is but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the character must have looked a bit too cartoonish for me and I was a teenager at the time that this character was being unveiled to the world.

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Kirby first appeared on the Game Boy in 1992 and while this might seem ridiculous to those who have always had high-quality color games, the Game Boy was on the cutting edge of technology when it was released and basically everyone had one.

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Despite the fact that the Nintendo handheld had no color, it quite easily outsold the Sega Game Gear and the Turbografx whatever that thing was called. The Turbografx machine was superior to both of them and was capable of playing all the games that were on the console so it must have been the high price, the fact that color screens tore through batteries like nobody's business, and the fact that you had to be careful about what sort of content you were attempting to display on a tiny as hell screen that would be totally unacceptable in today's times. But I digress

Kirby reached real market penetration on the 1993 release Kirby's Adventure. This is where Kirby differentiated him (it?) self from other game characters in that he could gain special abilities on the fly by "eating" things that appeared on the screen.

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I think I just figured out why I never played it. Kirby's Adventure was released on the NES and by 1993 I had already moved on to Sega Genesis and SNES and it was one of the last games ever produced for the NES. It sold pretty well, which is surprising since NES was on the way out at that point.

There have been 35 Kirby games, and a dedicated gamer like myself never played any of them. I realize that you don't know me but that is pretty remarkable by my standards. I may have to emulate a game or two this afternoon.

Anyway, the point behind this article is that when you have this many titles under your imaginary belt, it is reasonable to suggest that you are a very successful video game character and the story behind the character's name shows that Nintendo has a fantastic sense of humor.

In the 80's, Nintendo was struggling to defeat Atari, who was the king of video games at the time and Nintendo was just a fledgling company that made arcade games every now and then. With the immense success of the Donkey Kong arcade machine, which was the most popular video game at the time in 1983/1984, a massive lawsuit emerged where Universal Studios made the claim that Donkey Kong was copyright infringement on King Kong.

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I don't think you need to be terribly intelligent to realize that yeah, it kind of is based on King Kong but I also think that Universal Studios was overstepping their bounds to suggest that they have the sole right to menacing fantasy apes. The lawsuit was over the fact that "Kong" was used in the name and they kind of had a point. However, it was viewed by many as a money grab that Universal wouldn't have bothered with if the game hadn't been such a hit and it was simply a money grab.

The lead attorney for Nintendo was John Kirby and he ended up winning the lawsuit by proving that the word "Kong" in Japan, where the game originated, has tons of meanings and is used in a wide variety of situations many of which have nothing to do with apes at all. The judge saw things Kirby's way and awarded the suit to Nintendo. This saved Nintendo a ton of money and honestly, if they hadn't won that suit it is very conceivable that the NES might not have ever existed.

Nintendo would honor that man by naming the iconic character after him when the game was first released in 1992. He was pleased but then joked with Nintendo that he was going to sue them for using his name without permission. Obviously he never followed through with this and it was just lawyer jokes.

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The reason why Kirby (the character) looks sad above is because John Kirby unfortunately passed away last year in October due to complications associated with cancer of the blood.