IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: SEGA
» DEVELOPER: IN-HOUSE
» RELEASED: 1986
» PLATFORM: MASTER SYSTEM
» GENRE: PLATFORMER
people who continue to mistakenly call the character ‘Alex The Kid’ to this day. Later to join the project was artist Rieko Kodama (credited as ‘Rie Wakashimizu’). “At that time, Dragon Ball was extremely popular and I can understand Hayashida-san wanted to make a game of it,” she says. However, her own involvement began when the project was already well underway. “As I remember, I was not involved in the planning stage. When I joined the project, the character Alex Kidd was already set.”
How much did Kodama know about the intent behind the design of Alex Kidd as a character? “I was not responsible for character design so I cannot say for sure,” she responds. “I think the initiative was to make him more comical, and [they] designed him with an animation hero-like image – and, just like many fans say, Son-goku of Journey To The West.” says Kodama of her colleague’s work. Journey To The West was also the basis for Dragon Ball, so it’s no surprise to see the classic Chinese novel referenced here, too. Héctor Toro, the art director at Jankenteam – a team of Alex Kidd fans who are developing the official remake, Alex Kidd In Miracle World DX – recalls his initial reaction to the game’s hero: “When
I was a kid, I was not aware of the physical characteristics of the character, I just saw a child punching. It didn’t even surprise me that his fist [was] the same size as his head… but today I see him as a character with courage, a sense of justice and peace.”
Considering those influences, Alex Kidd was in many ways an archetypal hero, with his red jumpsuit, slightly monkey-like features and big appetite. However, when seen snacking on his favourite food between stages, Alex was eating something that would prove unfamiliar to western audiences – onigiri, aptly named ‘rice balls’ in the western manuals. “The reason why Alex likes onigiri could be simply because onigiri is one typical food in Japan,” says Kodama. “At the time the game was made, we did not think that Alex Kidd would be released in the west. Therefore, we simply put Japanese traditional ideas like onigiri and janken. I am very surprised that in present day fans are still enjoying Alex Kidd and show their love [for] watching him eating his onigiri.”
Kodama was still very new to Sega, in only her second year with the company, but she was given major responsibility for Alex Kidd
In Miracle World. “I felt happy to be given full responsibility for the title screen and backgrounds,” she explains. The background graphics that she drew were based on a range of environments that the planner had specified. “In [the] planning stage, Hayashida-san wanted Alex to have his adventure in various places,” the artist recalls. “In terms of background design, maps were made with stacking tons of blocks. Backgrounds were drawn without mapping. I started with drawing blocks, changing their colours trying to show animated movement. Lava and underwater were some examples.”
From a home console perspective, Alex Kidd In Miracle World was a state-of-the-art project. The Mark III hardware had only been introduced in October 1985 and still had the best graphical capabilities of any console on the market. But despite being so new to the company, Kodama had enjoyed the benefit of using arcade hardware for the previous project she had worked on, Quartet. Coming from hardware that would provide the basis for the Mega Drive, Kodama couldn’t help but see Sega’s 8-bit console as a step down. “In that time arcade motherboards would go first, and household consoles always had to try to catch up,” she says of the difference. “Mark III did not have multiple scrolling background nor good colour capability.” Still, working with the comparatively limited platform was a challenge that she relished. “We tried to fully utilise the features of Mark Iii/master System. It was fun trying to push the limits of the hardware.”
The project wasn’t just special because of the hardware it was running on, as the game had also been afforded a 128KB cartridge. This was a big deal – Alex Kidd would be only the sixth Sega console game to have such a large cartridge, which was four times what developers had previously been given to work with, even for high-profile arcade conversions like Hang-on. Still, Kodama felt that economical usage of that space was still a wise choice, as evidenced by her approach to the game’s title screen. “I tried to show Alex’s adventure like a comic book. By doing so I could use the same graphics as in the game without using extra memory,” she recalls. “This is something we do not take into consideration these days. In the past, we always tired to save a bit of memory here and there, and consume them at the climax.”
As well as giving Alex a wide range of environments to traverse, the use of the 128KB cartridge ensured that he would have a good variety of enemies to encounter. Most of them are drawn from the world of nature, as he’ll fight plenty of frogs, fish, scorpions and other creatures of the wild, but there are some more creative additions, too. The bubble-blowing Merman