Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Dōchū

Development

Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Dōchū was Konami's first NES game over one megabit in size. It started out as a port of the arcade game, Mr. Goemon, but ended up being drastically remodeled, since the arcade game didn't sell well. The basic design principle was to, given the then spacious megabit ROM, make the game big enough to let the player roam as freely as possible, while making it easy enough for even an unskilled player to beat by spending enough time in the game, shopping for upgrades. The size of the game lead to problems due to the lack of tools such as level editors, which meant that the designer had to draw up and connect the screens on graphing paper, and the project grew so much that the original two-man team had to bring in two additional programmers and an additional graphics artist to sort the game out.