This Week In Retro: Cave Story

December 2004: Huzzah!

by Diamond Feit

Much like two New Yorkers cannot agree what they mean when they say "upstate," we cannot draw a line in the sand and decide upon a fixed point when "retro" video games began. The inexorable march of time means that everyone's introduction to video games arrived at a moment unique to them. My earliest memories involved the original wood-paneled Atari console, while many kids in the U.K. think back to their childhood ZX Spectrum. My children, both born in the 21st century, first played video games on the 3DS or Wii U; from their perspective, 2D vs 3D or low-poly vs HD textures are purely aesthetic choices without any nostalgia attached.

While this sliding historical perspective means no one-size-fits-all "retro" category exists, those of us who lived through the 80s and 90s can tell you about the gaming trends at that time. Arcade games always sought to attract new players with more exciting visuals than the surrounding machines, while each new home console promised to improve upon all previous consoles. More memory and computing power meant a steady increase in available colors on screen, a higher number of simultaneously visible sprites, and higher-quality audio processing.

Eventually console technology came close enough to arcade specs that the gap between the two platforms dissolved, leading more players to skip coin-operated amusement centers in favor of gaming in their living rooms. 3D graphics also became commonplace, convincing software publishers that two-dimensional sprites were a thing of the past: Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, one by one these series abandoned their traditional presentations in favor of embracing the latest hardware.

Given this ever-escalating polygonal arms race, players took notice in the early 2000s whenever a new game arrived that looked the way all games used to look. In the case of long-running franchises, this usually took the form of a handheld spinoff while the "main" series continued in three dimensions. Yet for smaller studios, working with 2D assets lowered costs and complexity, allowing them to craft an original experience without investing in the newest graphical standards.

20 years ago this month, one such game emerged onto the internet. This labor of love came together over the course of five years as its lone creator designed everything from the levels and characters to the dialogue and the soundtrack. Once complete, Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya's Cave Story would serve as a poster child of independent game development and "retro" game design.

A new game of Cave Story begins—you guessed it—in a cave. The player character looks human and wears a little red outfit including a cap; like Nintendo's famous mascot, he's a good jumper. In these initial moments, players have nothing to do but explore the cave's interior, avoiding small monsters and spikes as they descend.

Hidden inside a stone lion's open maw, a small abode rests in the deep recesses of the cave. Entering the strange home, players find a sleeping man and a treasure chest. We all know that every video game upholds the tradition of "finders keepers," so the gun sitting in the unlocked container is ours for the taking. Now armed, players can shoot enemies and obstacles to exit the cave.

Escaping this initial area drops us (quite literally) into Mimiga Village, a bright if sparsely populated community. The Mimigas look like rabbits but wear clothes and speak to one another. Between their own conversations and asking around, we learn they've made enemies with someone called The Doctor. Having lost their neighbors to his attacks, the few remaining Mimigas live in fear, struggling to come up with a way to protect the remaining residents.

Mimiga Village gives players a chance to freely look around; the first cave only had one exit but this large space has multiple doors to open. After an initial perusal of the town, players come face-to-face with two of The Doctor's goons. They say they're looking for "Sue" and kidnap a Mimiga who protests and says they've mistaken her for her friend, but the intruders don't seem to care.

As witnesses to this crime, players find themselves drawn into the Mimigas' plight and set off on an adventure. No one implicitly directs our hero towards danger, but a few tidbits of overheard information do suggest they're here for a reason—even if no one understands what that could be. Like Link, our hero never actually speaks, even when others purport to recognize them; this adds a layer to the game's many mysteries, including The Doctor's motives, the Mimigas' past, and the very nature of this extensive network of caves.

Cave Story makes an incredible first impression. True to his nickname, Daisuke Amaya makes excellent use of classic pixel art to give all his characters—hero and villain alike—a cute and welcoming appearance. The music, right from the jaunty title theme, sticks in your head like the great chiptune compositions of the NES era. Even though players spend a vast majority of Cave Story underground, the colors and background tunes create a unique atmosphere for every stage.

The moment players pick up their first upgrade in the opening area, they'll hear a short jingle that sounds awfully close to the celebratory chime of Metroid. This simple nod represents the most overt callback in all of Cave Story. Amaya pours his passion and reverence for the 8-bit era of video games into his opus, creating a work of art that pays homage to the past without breathlessly recreating it; he makes no effort to hide his inspirations, but neither does he wink at his audience to imply that they're clever for seeing the connection.

Besides crafting a visually and aurally first-rate piece of work, Amaya's dedication to gameplay is what makes Cave Story shine. Like the graphics, the two-button controls harken back to the early days of home consoles. Both jumping and shooting feel responsive; our protagonist can control his movement mid-air and aim in four cardinal directions. When I first played Cave Story I lacked a proper PC gamepad, but even using the keyboard I could run and gun just like the old days.

Holding all these delicate pieces together is Cave Story's story, another Amaya triumph. There's not much plot here, but the narrative has just enough intrigue to entice players forward, especially as Amaya dishes it out in small portions over time.  He also throws in a few twists along the way to encourage replaying the game, as optional player choices affect the fate of certain supporting characters and the ending. Amaya even came up with a secret ending locked behind an extra-hard final area that most players never find and fewer still manage to complete. In a 2011 GDC presentation, Amaya himself admitted he can't beat this so-called Hell Stage anymore, telling the crowd "you don't have to finish this level." 

If anything is more remarkable than a single developer putting together an extraordinarily entertaining video game all by himself, it is the events that followed Cave Story's initial release. Amaya shared the game for free on his website and Japanese blogs took notice; a January 2005 review hailed Cave Story's balance as "superb" and recommended the game to everyone "from beginners to hardcore gamers."

Within weeks of launch, fans turned into evangelists, teaming up to help spread the word. Independent of Amaya but with his blessing, they ported Cave Story to Macintosh and even wrote a patch that translated all text into English. On 1up.com in February 2005, Scott Sharkey gushed about "Tale of the Cave" and its level of polish, saying "it rivals modern GBA Castlevania and Metroid games in terms of scope and play time." Noting that the game was still so new that nobody had written a walkthrough yet, Sharkey made one himself to direct more players towards Amaya's charming creation.

As Cave Story's reputation grew, publisher Nicalis contacted Daisuke Amaya seeking to bring his game to consoles. Ports, remasters, and even a 3D remake helmed by Amaya followed thereafter; today Cave Story is available in one form or another on various Nintendo platforms and Steam in addition to the original freeware version for home computers.

Now that two entire decades have passed since Cave Story's debut, I feel duty-bound to explain the impact it had back in 2004. Arcades in the US were growing scarce while the PlayStation 2 and Xbox slugged it out for control of the living room. Both Nintendo and Sony shipped brand-new handhelds that year, heralding 3D gaming on the go. Even a die-hard like me had to part ways with many of my classic 2D systems because I couldn't take my entire library with me when I returned to college that fall; only my PS2 made the trip.

Discovering Cave Story in that environment caused me to reflect on my passions and remember how and why I fell in love with video games in the first place. Cave Story showed me that sprite-based graphics still had their place, that exploring a 2D world still had untapped potential, and that nostalgia had nothing to do with my yearning for so-called "retro" games.

Year later, after I moved to Japan and began freelance writing, I got to meet Daisuke Amaya at the very first BitSummit in 2013. I only had a few minutes of his time so I couldn't just unload all my Cave Story feelings onto him, but I didn't have to. The two of us were crowded into a room packed with indie developers all hoping their pet projects might find as much success as Amaya did with Cave Story. I don't know if BitSummit—now an annual event with corporate sponsors—would even exist without Cave Story.

Putting all that aside, my biggest takeaway from 20 years of Cave Story is I want everyone to express themselves creatively. There's no way Daisuke Amaya thought the free game he made in his spare time would ever appear in the same sentence as the big-budget franchises that he played in his youth. If he had a publisher or an investor at that time, they would have warned him that the market for 2D action games was shrinking, not growing. Yet he completed and released Cave Story anyway, and the gaming world is a richer, more colorful place thanks to him and his rabbit caves.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.