Just as he set out to finally begin making his game, he encountered his first hiccup. In 1999, Amaya decided that the time for cuteness was now. “Games have various kinds of ‘fun’, and for me, ‘cute’ is one thing I cannot separate from ‘fun’. “The character wasn’t cute enough,” Amaya says of Super Metroid. Amaya loved the game and it was a great source of inspiration for Cave Story, but he felt that something was missing. As his friend Nao continued to teach him to program, the urge to make his own video game grew as Amaya played through Super Metroid.

While he had no intention of entering the games industry, he had a soft spot for side-scrolling action games and often thought of making something himself, just for fun. “In 1996 I was studying at a computer technical school and living in a dormitory - my neighbour was a guy named Nao he taught me how to program video games.”Īmaya had always been a gamer. “I had always enjoyed drawing and making music, and I loved video games,” Amaya says in an interview with Kotaku AU. His story is one that illustrates that the joyful bundle of sprites, music and clever platforms could not have been made by anyone but himself. When we ask him to delve into the past to share his game-making history with us, he does so generously. Despite the cult status of his game and its successful re-releases, he is humble and immediately likable. He is many things: a talented game designer, a husband, a father and, until recently, a salary man who worked full-time making systems that operate printing machines. With no publisher or distributor, the game with an elusive developer spread through gaming circles and became an underground success that made ‘Pixel’ precisely zero dollars.ĭaisuke “Pixel” Amaya is the developer of Cave Story. How people found Cave Story is anyone’s guess, but found it they most certainly did. Social media was but a chubby infant learning to crawl - there was no Twitter, no Facebook “Likes”, and the dominant social network, MySpace, did not make it easy to share information. There was no marketing budget, and thus no marketing. It was a free downloadable file that anyone could access, install, and play. In 2004 (back when The Internet was possibly still capitalised), a developer who went by the handle “Pixel” uploaded his game onto the internet. Despite having the odds stacked against it, it still doggy-paddled its way through the overflowing virtual pool of data to become a cult success. What is interesting - precious, even - is how Cave Story came to be.

The game development scene has no shortage of solo developers who have become industry celebrities, and many best-sellers and critically-acclaimed titles have burst forth from the minds of indie developers. The Cave Story story is not interesting because the game was made by one person, or because it was an indie success.

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