What’s the greatest NES game of all time? Super Mario Bros 3? Perhaps it’s Mega-Man 2, or The Legend of Zelda? There’s almost certainly no definitive answer to the single best game on the console, but what If I told you one of its greatest games was one that not only shattered the perception of what you could achieve on the NES, but was also a game you’ve (probably) never heard of?
Gimmick!, developed by Japanese studio Sunsoft, was a Nintendo Entertainment System masterpiece. But despite critical acclaim – including praise from industry legends Shigeru Miyamoto and Masahiro Sakurai – it was almost immediately forgotten, in no small part thanks to the fact it was only ever released in Japan and one small Scandinavian pocket of the West. Despite its obscurity, though, one Swedish fan not only loved Gimmick!, he obsessed over it. This was more than a mere hobby, too, as he set up his own studio with the lifelong goal of creating the sequel Gimmick! deserved and finally exposing it to the world.
But the journey wasn’t easy. From being laughed out of a pitch meeting to mass layoffs threatening the studio’s existence, the path to Gimmick! 2 has been as tricky as its notoriously difficult predecessor.
This is the Inside Story of Gimmick!, the greatest forgotten NES game and its unexpected 2024 sequel.
Despite its relative obscurity, Gimmick! is appreciated. It’s regularly mentioned in top lists by hardcore NES enthusiasts and original copies trade on eBay for ungodly amounts of money. Iconic Nintendo game director Shigeru Miyamoto said it was “fun”, extremely high praise from someone who rarely (if at all) praises other people’s games. Kirby and Super Smash Bros visionary Masahiro Sakurai has been even more enthusiastic, saying Gimmick! was “a technical marvel”.
But what is it about Gimmick! that’s so revered? Why do hardcore fans and industry legends worship a game about a green, star-throwing blob called Yumetaro?
“It just did a lot of things to stand out,” says Illusory Wall, a Dark Souls YouTuber and huge fan of Gimmick! “It was offering an experience that was unique.” That uniqueness was exemplified by Gimmick!’s star mechanic, a charged projectile that also could serve as a platform to jump off – a rare feature by even today’s standards, but in 1992 it was revolutionary.
“I can’t think of another platformer on the NES that has anything close to the mechanics of this game,” says Pat the NES Punk, retro Nintendo enthusiast, YouTuber and Gimmick! obsessive. “What’s amazing about the star attack is that it’s based seemingly on realistic physics. It deflects off objects and enemies, it bounces and dissipates.”
Gimmick! was more than its star mechanic, though. Not only was it a tight, colourful, and fun platformer equal to many of its peers, but Gimmick! also set new standards for variety and detail. In an era where Super Mario games constantly reused sprites and tile sets, Gimmick! was full of environmental diversity. Each level was unique and also loaded with bespoke one-off moments; moments that often weren’t required, but just added an unprecedented level of depth to each space.
“There’s these two sprites at the beginning of level six that don’t exist anywhere else in the game and it’s basically a guy playing with his dog,” explains Illusory Wall. “The dog gets excited for you holding onto the star, it treats it like you’re holding onto a ball – It’ll wag its tail and come after you. The guy is tepid, he doesn’t want to be in your business. The fact that they’re not even trying to attack you adds an extra layer. They feel like these living creatures in the game, they’re not just obstacles.”
“In the second stage, you can knock over the spiny turtle enemy. If you then jump on the legs of the character it’ll kick you in the opposite direction, it’s realistically pushing you off the enemy,” explains Pat the NES Punk. ”There’s no gameplay reason for that to exist in the game. It’s just a cute little touch that other games [of the era] wouldn’t have.”
Gimmick! is jam-packed with these moments. Its second level even features a Metal Gear Solid-like moment where the end-level boss can be found asleep if you reach him too quickly. Each level is full of detail reserved for only the most ambitious games of today. “I firmly believe that Gimmick! would always be on [anyone’s] top 5 NES game had it been released [beyond Japan and Scandinavia]” claims Pat the NES Punk.
Gimmick! fans know it’s special, but despite being a critical hit, the game never reached an audience large enough to gain commercial success. Gimmick! (or Mr. Gimmick! in Sweden) was never released outside of Japan and Sweden. And even in the two countries where it did make it to shelves, its availability was limited. So much so that many of the Swedish developers working on the sequel hadn’t heard of it before they joined the project.
“I first heard of Gimmick! through a Swedish retro gaming YouTube channel,” says Olof Karlsson, Lead Programmer on Gimmick! 2. ”I grew up playing Nintendo games, and I never played Gimmick! It’s like Kirby’s Adventure in the quality level, except that no one really knows about it. How?”
So why was Gimmick!, despite its apparent quality, never widely released in the West? Perhaps it arrived too late into the NES’s lifecycle, or was an unfortunate victim of cost-saving measures. According to Sunsoft’s former vice president of development in America, David Siller, the company’s managers felt the game’s characters were too “strange or quirky”. For a game aimed at children, this – paired with the elevated difficulty level – perhaps didn’t present well for its target audience. That’s right, Gimmick! Is hard. REALLY hard.
“It’s a game that looks cute and colourful – probably most analogous to Kirby on the NES. But Kirby was more reasonable to get through,” explains Illusory Wall. “Despite its cute looks [Gimmick! is] more of a Castlevania than a Kirby.”
“The difficulty of Mr. Gimmick was one of its advertising features,” recalls Pat the NES Punk. In fact, an ominous warning was even on the back of the original box: “Every game you played before has only prepared you for this ultimate challenge. You’ll call on many skills, techniques and tricks you’ve learned to help Mr. Gimmick survive the evil onslaught. Only the strong will survive and only the very best will experience the secret ending.”
Despite the positive critical reception Gimmick has received over time, its inevitable lack of commercial success never presented an opportunity for a sequel. Gimmick!, like many forgotten gems of its era, faded into obscurity, with Sunsoft leaving Yumetaro to gather decades worth of dust. 30 years later, though, one hardcore Swedish fan had different ideas…
“I didn’t own Gimmick!, I [only] played it at a friend’s house, but I truly remember the characters in the game. They were so much alive compared to [other] games,” says Niklas Istenes, the CEO and founder of Bitwave Games and creator of Gimmick! 2. “[Later on] when I started to collect games I finally bought the cart and I remembered I loved it. I watched speedruns, I watched people highlighting the secrets, I was so intrigued by how many details there are in this game. It was my go-to title when people came over and saw my retro collection. I always brought out my Gimmick! [cartridge] first.”
It’s clear that Istenes is a super fan of Gimmick!, and that was reinforced when IGN visited the Gimmick!-filled Bitwave office in February of 2023. But the dots still needed connecting. How had this small, Swedish developer –- who at the time had only released one game called Pictoparty on the Wii U – been allowed to create the sequel to a forgotten, Japanese, Nintendo cult classic?
“I had no idea if Sunsoft was still around, maybe they’re bankrupt or something?” shares Istenes. “Maybe they don’t care anymore about their old IPs? So I wrote… not even a pitch, it was more of like, ’Hey, do you still have this IP? We’re interested in doing a sequel. What’s the royalty cost, yada, yada, yada.’”
“My proposition was around $10,000. They’re like, ‘No, that’s small fry for us. You’re a nobody. You made a party game on Wii U. No way you’re getting one of our most cherished IPs.’ I don’t know what I expected. It was a shot in the dark.”
Istenes’ attempt was bold and certainly naive. He explained that Bitwave Games (previously known as Retroid Interactive) was built on a foundation of his love for Gimmick!. He would often wax lyrical about the forgotten platformer to his colleagues, and now it appeared his dream of making a sequel was now dead. But a few years later, right in the eye of the Covid pandemic storm – an event that threatened the studio’s very survival – there was a glimmer of hope…
“It was a very low period, and there was a lot of talk of whether we should just close down” recalls Istenes. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So I reached out to a friend called Martin Lindell. Martin came back and he was like, ‘I started at Embracer. Could you pitch your company to us?’ The vision of my company was to do the sequel Gimmick!, so that’s what I pitched.”
Embracer Group is a large Swedish game licensing company that, at one time, was making an unfathomable number of acquisitions, Bitwave being one of them. Embracer not only liked what Bitwave had to offer, but was on board with trying to get the rights to a Gimmick! sequel. It immediately got to work putting Istenes in front of Sunsoft to pitch the concept after an undisclosed, but no doubt significantly improved offer.
“I couldn’t see how they reacted because it was a very small window in Microsoft Teams, and they were all wearing face masks,” recalls Istenes, describing his awkward videocall pitch to Sunsoft. “The translator also had an issue with her camera, so she had to turn it off. Then her default image was a cat, so it was like a cat was translating it. It was just weird. They could feel my passion for the game, though, and I think that’s what truly nailed it in the end.”
Finally, a lifelong dream could be realised. Bitwave Games could now create a sequel to the long-forgotten masterpiece. There was just one problem… they now had to make a game that not only honoured the original, but one that surpassed it…
“We wanted it to stand on its own. We want it to be a fun platforming game that appeals to everyone,” explains Lead Programmer Olof Karlsson. “ We want it to be accessible, but also a true sequel. We don’t want [fans of the original] to feel like we’ve massacred their boy. It should be like, ‘Wow, they really took this to a new direction but it’s still Gimmick!.’”
The passion for Gimmick! 2 at the Bitwave office during our visit was undeniable, but it was all built on the foundation of their love of the original. Istenes is proud of the space, particularly his treasured retro collection. And of course, the items that took pride of place were his valuable original editions of Gimmick!.
“I bought the PAL version first. It was $250,” recalls Istenes. “The guy who sold it had no idea what he had on his hands. He was cleaning his mother’s basement, found a bunch of NES games he played when he was young, and decided to sell them on Tradera [Scandinavia’s eBay equivalent]. He was [very confused about] why this was so special.”
He wasn’t the only person struggling to understand the second-hand value of this long-forgotten cartridge. Gimmick! recently featured on the Swedish TV show, Bytt är bytt, A.K.A Trash or Treasure. It’s a show that tasks contestants to estimate the value of antique objects. Not only had the contestant, despite being a self-proclaimed NES fan, never heard of Gimmick!, but the host also openly declared it “The game that nobody wanted”. But Istenes wanted it. And he didn’t just want the Swedish edition, he wanted the definitive release.
“The Japanese version is the version you need because it has an extra sound chip,” reveals Istenes, pointing out that only the Famicom edition featured the revolutionary YM2149 sound processor, a piece of hardware that doubled the game’s audio channels. And when Istenes finally acquired his very own Japanese version, inside the collector’s item’s case was more than just an enhanced Gimmick! cartridge. The seller had included a secret note…
“Hi, Niklas, my name is Takumi Hamada. Thank you bid. I’m very happy. I want to be friends with people around the world on eBay. Please contact bullshit. I always want to Japanese products. I help you anytime. Arigato.”
“He wanted to be friends with me on eBay,” says Istenes, smiling from ear to ear. “If you’re out there, thank you very much for this amazing product, which does not contain any bullshit at all!”
Gimmick! was more than a game to Istenes. It was nostalgia in its purest form, reminding him of the time he spent enjoying the game with his childhood friend. Decades later, Gimmick! was still helping him forge friendships. “When I joined, it was just Niklas and Gustav and both of them were consultants,” explains Karlsson. “I was the only one working in-house. The reason I joined this company was because I wanted to work with Niklas.”
The Gimmick! 2 team was quickly being assembled, but by the time production of the long overdue sequel was in full swing Istenes obtained perhaps his greatest coup: “I reached out to a composer I used to work with, but he was too busy for the project,” says Istenes, “He told me to shoot for the stars though. Which composer would I want to work on a game like this? I thought it would be cool to work with someone like David Wise.”
It was clear that Istenes had no problem shooting for the stars. After already successfully getting the rights to his dream game, he boldly reached out to the iconic David Wise; the video game composer famous for soundtracks such as Donkey Kong Country and Battletoads. He was Istenes’ dream composer. And, perhaps to his surprise, Wise immediately said ‘yes’.
”I love [classic] Nintendo games and working on the platform,” says Wise. “It was an easy ‘Yep, I want to be involved.’”
The pair immediately got to work on finding Gimmick! 2’s unique musical tone, looking for the sweet spot between the original and the sequel’s two countries of origin. “I’ve made sure I’ve used this wonderful instrument called the Nyckelharpa,” explains Wise, referring to a Swedish instrument whose name translates to ‘key harp’. “It’s like a violin, but it’s got these little wooden switches on them. It’s got its own ethereal sound and I was very keen to get that into the soundtrack.”
“I remember playing Donkey Kong Country and listening to the aquatic theme that he made and doing fan drawings when I was in school,” says Istenes. “It was just so amazing to be working with him.”
Not only had Istenes got the rights to make his dream sequel, but he had also struck a deal with his dream composer. Gimmick! 2’s production was progressing well. So well, in fact, that it was only a matter of time until disaster struck…
In June 2023, Embracer Group announced a restructuring program, making significant cuts to the entire workforce across all of its acquired studios. Unfortunately, staff at Bitwave Games were among the many casualties, losing half of their colleagues in one fell swoop. Gimmick! 2 was immediately put in jeopardy.
“When the news hit it was scary,” explains Istenes. “I didn’t know exactly how it would affect the studio. It wasn’t like I had a list of people that I knew would have to leave. But since it’s a monetary situation, it needed to happen fast.”
“It was one of the darkest days in the history of our company,” says Senior Game Developer, Hampus Lidin. “I don’t think we’d had such a huge setback before.” It was a setback that caused Lead Programmer Olof Karlsson to feel a little lost: “I was very confused about how to handle this. How do I feel? What am I supposed to feel?”
“People who had to leave were a part of the company for five years, and there are some staff members that’d been a part of the project from the beginning,” shares Istenes. “You kind of just have to shut off your human part of the situation.”
Understandably, this was a tough pill to swallow for the affected staff. But Istenes was also deeply troubled by the situation, as he’d always thought of Embracer as the studio’s saviour. In a single moment, everything was turned upside down. “I’m not blaming Embracer for what happened,” says Istenes. “It’s external forces and how the industry is. My relationship with Embracer is still very good. They’re just pivoting as well to just try to make the best out of a situation. Some hard calls needed to be made.”
Six months had passed since we first visited the studio in February of 2023, and since then the Embracer cuts hadn’t been the only bad news for the production of Gimmick! 2. During that time, Lead Programmer Olaf Karlsson had stepped away from the project due to burnout, only to later return out of necessity after the layoffs.
“The fact that I only lasted six months before burning out was heartbreaking,” explains Karlsson. “I came back as a result of the layoffs. Niklas approached me and said, ‘I know that you burnt out on this previous project and that you didn’t want to hear about it anymore, but could you consider coming back?’ And I was like, ’Yes, of course.’”
Gimmick! 2 had stalled, and there was a genuine fear that this labour of love might never make it to the finish line. But there was still an underlying determination from its leader to see it through, and that passion emanated through the entire studio. “I don’t really want to work on something unless I feel like everyone around me really wants to do it,” says Karlsson. “To have the CEO want to do it this much [gives you] a level of engagement that you otherwise wouldn’t really get.”
Surprisingly, despite the hurdles, Gimmick! 2 got back on track fast, with Istenes – in a desperate attempt to save his dream – introducing a pivot into production.
“I want it to be the best game ever,” says Istenes. ”I want every idea that I have to be in the game, which makes it very, very hard to design a game like that. When the news broke, I knew we could still [finish] the game, but we needed to pivot back to the roots and focus more on gameplay. It was pretty clear from the beginning what we needed to cut in the game to still make it great and as long and enjoyable as we wanted it to be.”
The pivot back to a gameplay focus allowed the Bitwave team to refocus on their original vision, cut out the unnecessary bells and whistles, and double down on the core experience that made the original so beloved. “It feels more true. It feels more like a sequel.” explains Karlsson. “It doesn’t just feel like something wearing the old game’s skin. It feels like a true sequel to Gimmick!. We can actually finish this still. This is doable.”
Gimmick! 2 is fast approaching. In fact, there’s a good chance it’s available for you to play right now. Despite the hardships, the whole project has been built with consistent passion. Whether it was a love of the original’s design, technology, hardware, or just plain nostalgia, Bitwave Games has been built on the foundation of Yumetaro, and that love bleeds through every frame of the sequel.
“The opportunity to work on Gimmick! 2 was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” explains Karlsson.”I think what will make it special is a combination of what we’re aiming for; a very tight, mechanically interesting and fun platforming game with amazing visuals and a beautiful soundtrack composed by f**king David Wise of all people. How did we get David Wise? It’s incredible.”
“I hope it captures the same spirit of the original,” says Pat the NES Punk. “ I hope it seems like a world of wonder with interesting enemies and characters you encounter along the way.”
“I hope people will learn more about the original one,” says Istenes. “I think this will be a much better game in more than one sense. But I hope people will play this, enjoy the game, and then go back and play the original game. And, hopefully, we’ll make a sequel to this one as well!”
For better or worse, Gimmick! 2 fulfils a lifelong ambition. Time will tell if the sequel will create its own lasting impact like its predecessor, or perhaps even exceed the original’s legacy. We don’t know if Bitwave Games will thrive or fall under the weight of an ever-evolving industry, and we don’t know if Gimmick! will ever truly receive all the praise it so clearly deserves. What we do know is that Yumetaro started a dream. A dream that built a studio, helped craft a vision decades in the making, and forged an assortment of beautiful friendships.
Not bad for a barely released, forgotten ‘90s game about an anthropomorphic, star-throwing green blob.
“This game has always been a project of the studio’s heart,” says Istenes. “We didn’t pick this to be the game that would make us the richest studio in Gothenburg. It’s to set a trend of how we make high-quality games, that’s what we’re aiming for here. As long as some people enjoy playing the game, and get a fun player experience from it, then I’m happy.”
Thank you to Pat the NES Punk, Illusory Wall, Pekachow, David Wise, Niklas Istenes, and everyone at Bitwave Games for their time. Special thank you to Jesse Gomez for production and Andréas Göransson for sharing the story.
