Prerelease:Kirby Air Ride

This page details prerelease information and/or media for Kirby Air Ride.

'"The truth of the matter was... The rest of the team at my company was already busy working on other games. Meaning there was nobody available. Among these games were MOTHER 3 on the 64DD, and a more snowboarding-like version of [Kirby] Air Ride, unrelated to the GameCube game... After all those projects ended up falling through, we needed a finished game as soon as possible."'

— Masahiro Sakurai, talking about HAL's struggle on the Nintendo 64.

The development of Kirby Air Ride is an interesting tale, originally starting as a sequel to Kirby's Dream Course (known as Kirby Bowl in Japan) before becoming its own unique thing. "Kirby Bowl 64" was one of the first games revealed for the then-Ultra 64, with a playable demo being present at Shoshinkai 1995. Afterwards, the game would be shown off again at E3 1996, reworked and retitled "Kirby's Air Ride". After a very brief appearance at E3 1997, the project was put on hold to focus on 1080° Snowboarding, not being seen until 2003, when the game was re-revealed at the DICE Summit as Kirby Air Ride and releasing the same year.

Kirby Bowl 64 Era

Kirby Bowl 64 was first shown off at Nintendo's seventh annual Shoshinkai event (November 22-24, 1995) as a playable demo alongside Super Mario 64. The game featured three playable modes:

• A single-player mode where players could choose to play as Kirby in either ball form or on a board as he went down a steep slope, collecting stars and avoiding enemies and other obstacles.
• A multiplayer mode where four players controlled different-colored Kirbys as they tried to knock each other out of the area as it constantly changed shape.

Many players compared these modes to Marble Madness.