Bite-Sized Game History: Tracking Down the Origin of Miyamoto’s Most Famous Quote and Kirby’s Very First Appearance in a Game

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

This well-worn saying is trotted out every single time a major game is delayed and has long been attributed to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, supposedly said as a response to the protracted development of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But with the recent delay of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2, fans began to wonder, did Miyamoto ever actually share that famous bit of wisdom with an interviewer?

The answer might surprise you…

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

Let’s get right to it. Is Miyamoto the source of the quote? Unfortunately, no. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

As Ethan Johnson discovered when he dug into the history behind the quote, it was apparently a common sentiment inside game development studios in the 1990s. It first appeared in print in a November 1997 preview of Sony’s Blasto as an “industry catch phrase” and then later showed up as a direct quote from developer Jason Schreiber in a June 1998 preview of Unreal.

It likely got tangled up with Nintendo after an Ocarina of Time preview from June 1998 included a mention of the quote (though the article specifically stated that it did not originate with Miyamoto):

But wait, there’s more. The baton was passed to Kate Willaert, who found an even earlier reference to the quote, and possibly, its origin.

During a Game Developers Conference panel in 1996 (back when it was known as the Computer Game Developers Conference), a version of the quote (“A game is only late until it ships, but its bad forever”) was attributed to Origin’s Siobhan Beeman. Wilaert then contacted Beeman, who confirmed that she believes she came up with it, though admits that “the sentiment certainly existed [throughout] the industry.”

So is that it? Is Beeman the source of the quote? As with every other question asked so far, the answer is a solid… “Maybe?”

And with the idea being so widespread in the game industry at the time, there’s even the possibility that Miyamoto himself said a version of it to someone at sometime in the last 26 years. But that’s an investigation for another time:

Switching gears a bit, one game that wasn’t delayed out of 2022 was Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which launched to near universal acclaim back in March. But did you know that Kirby’s first appearance in a game wasn’t in 1992’s Kirby’s Dream Land?

It’s true. SuperDarkMimeIV recently dug up a screenshot from Arcana, an underappreciated little RPG for the Super NES that was also developed by HAL Laboratory in 1992.

The game’s opening cinematic describes an epic battle between a peaceful kingdom and an army of darkness. There, in the middle of the advancing horde, sits everyone’s favorite pink puffball, one month before the release of Kirby’s Dream Land:

A delayed thanks to Ethan Johnson and Kate Willaert for finally uncovering the truth about one of gaming’s most widespread myths. And also thanks to SuperDarkMimeIV for reminding everyone about Arcana, which really is a fantastic card-based dungeon crawler, and for identifying Kirby in the middle of that melee.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.