How Kid Icarus: Uprising Was Made
In March 2012, a game arrived on Nintendo 3DS that seemed as though it should never have existed. By then, the Kid Icarus series had been considered all but dead for almost two decades: its creators had long since moved on to other projects, and Nintendo did not even have an available team it could assign to a sequel.
Yet Kid Icarus: Uprising was made. It was not a cautious remake or an attempt to repeat the NES game, either. Masahiro Sakurai assembled an entirely new team, combined a rail shooter with a third-person action game, wrote an enormous script, and tried to squeeze everything he could out of the newly released Nintendo 3DS.
The most interesting part is that this story did not begin with Pit or the goddess Palutena at all.
Nintendo / Kid Icarus: Uprising / nintendo.com
The Dinner That Started It All
Masahiro Sakurai left HAL Laboratory in 2003. He did not want to spend his entire career making only Kirby and Super Smash Bros., so he began working as an independent developer. He later founded the small company Sora Ltd. with his wife, Michiko, but it was not a full-scale studio with dozens of employees. A new team had to be assembled separately for every major game.
That was how Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii was made. Nintendo rented an office in Tokyo, and specialists from different companies temporarily became a single team. After the game was released in early 2008, the staff went their separate ways, leaving Sakurai almost entirely on his own again.
A few months later, in July 2008, Satoru Iwata invited him to dinner.
Nintendo's president told Sakurai about a new handheld system that was still at an early stage of development. The future Nintendo 3DS was such a secret project that it could not be discussed openly even with potential employees.
Iwata asked Sakurai to create a game for the new console aimed at experienced players. It needed to be clearly different from the projects Nintendo's internal teams usually made and demonstrate the capabilities of the upcoming hardware.
At that point, the console did not have final specifications, and the developers did not even have hardware on which to test their ideas. Sakurai had effectively been asked to design a game for a console that did not yet exist in the real world.
How a Shooter Became Kid Icarus
Sakurai decided that the best way to show off the stereoscopic screen was with a game in which objects constantly moved out of the distance and toward the player. That led to the idea of aerial battles: the hero races forward along a fixed route, dodges incoming fire, and shoots down enemies.
But a beautiful 3D demonstration alone was not enough for him. After a short flight, the hero would land, freely explore an area, and continue fighting on the ground. This brought two very different parts together in one game: a fast-paced rail shooter and a third-person action game.
Nintendo approved the concept in October 2008. Kid Icarus was not part of it yet. At first, Sakurai planned to create an entirely new hero.
Star Fox was also considered. At first glance, the series seemed like a perfect fit: spaceships, flying, shooting, and a familiar character. The problem appeared on the ground. An Arwing could not run through ruins, descend stairways, or fight enemies in small arenas. Fox could have piloted the ship during the aerial sections and then climbed out for the ground stages, but the two halves of the game would have felt too disconnected.
They needed a hero who could fly without being tied to an aircraft.
That was when they remembered Pit.
A Return After a Quarter of a Century
The first Kid Icarus was released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System in December 1986 before making its way to the NES. It was a strange blend of platformer, shooter, and adventure game: Pit climbed out of the Underworld, collected weapons, entered fortresses, and fought Medusa.
The game had an ancient Greek setting, but it never took mythology too seriously. Credit cards, hammers, and magical eggplants that turned the hero into a helpless vegetable existed comfortably alongside gods and monsters.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters arrived for Game Boy in North America in 1991 and Europe one year later. It was not released in Japan at the time. That is why Japanese advertising for Uprising described the series as returning after 25 years, while Western players had waited roughly twenty years for a new installment. Both figures are correct in their own way.
After that, the series disappeared.
Pit returned only in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where he received a new design and a complete set of moves. The response from players showed that people still remembered the character. He was also perfectly suited to the structure Sakurai had devised: Palutena could grant him the power of flight for a few minutes and then send him down to the ground.
That was how an unnamed experiment for a new console gradually became Kid Icarus: Uprising.
The First Office and the Birth of Project Sora
A small temporary office was rented for the project in Tokyo's Takadanobaba district in November 2008. There were almost no employees and no Nintendo 3DS development tools.
Sakurai recalled that the window glass seemed "razor-thin" and that drafts constantly blew in through the windows. It hardly looked like the beginning of a major game for the new console.
Project Sora / オフィス紹介 / project-sora.co.jp
During the first few months, the work was handled by a small group. The artists prepared character and environment artwork, while Sakurai wrote the design documents, story, and dialogue.
Full-scale development, however, required many more people. Secrecy made recruitment difficult: Nintendo had not yet announced the 3DS, so job listings could not openly explain what applicants would be working on.
Why Project Sora Was Needed
To assemble a full team specifically for the game, Nintendo and Sora Ltd. established a separate company called Project Sora on January 22, 2009. Its starting capital was 200 million yen, 72 percent of which was provided by Nintendo.
The names are easy to confuse, so it is worth clarifying them. Sora Ltd. was Sakurai's personal company and continued operating after the game was released. Project Sora was created specifically to develop one large project with a team assembled for that purpose. They were separate companies.
Project Sora was officially announced in February, and recruitment began immediately. Nintendo revealed only a few details: the project was intended for experienced players, it was not another Super Smash Bros., and development was scheduled to finish in 2011. The Nintendo 3DS still could not be discussed publicly.
Full-scale development began in March 2009. Specialists arrived from different studios with different working methods. Sakurai later described Uprising as one of the hardest projects of his career: the developers had to create a complex game while also learning how to work together.
Project Sora had no years of shared experience, no finished engine, and no clear example to follow. The team was being built at the same time as the game itself.
A Game for a Console That Did Not Exist Yet
The first prototypes were made on ordinary computers. For a time, the developers also used Wii hardware because proper Nintendo 3DS development tools were not available immediately.
Sakurai prepared two video prototypes. One showed aerial combat, and the other showed a battle on the ground. They were created before the Project Sora team had grown and look remarkably similar to the final game: Pit flies along a fixed route, shoots enemies, and then runs through a three-dimensional area.
These videos helped new employees quickly understand the kind of game they were expected to make. Describing a mixture of rail shooter and ground-based action game in words was much harder.
When Project Sora finally received a Nintendo 3DS development kit, the game had to be adapted to the console itself. The work took even longer because Nintendo was still changing the 3DS hardware, forcing the developers to keep reworking the game along with it.
“Sorry to Keep You Waiting”
Nintendo officially unveiled the Nintendo 3DS at E3 on June 15, 2010. Kid Icarus: Uprising was the first game announced for the system.
The trailer opened with Pit saying, “Sorry to keep you waiting!”
It was both a joke about the long absence of Kid Icarus and a message to viewers who had asked Nintendo to bring the series back after Pit appeared in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
The video made the intended impression. Pit raced above the clouds and fought enormous monsters, while the 3DS's stereoscopic screen promised to make the flight feel almost like an amusement ride.
Nintendo / Kid Icarus Uprising Trailer — E3 2010 / youtube.com
But such an impressive reveal had a downside. Because Uprising was announced alongside the console itself, many people assumed it would be available at launch. Nintendo never promised that, but the expectation took hold.
Nintendo still planned to release the game by the end of 2011, but announced a delay in September. Uprising finally launched on March 22, 2012 in Japan and March 23 in Europe and North America, roughly a year after the Nintendo 3DS itself had arrived.
Five Minutes in the Air
The aerial battles became the game's most spectacular feature. Pit cannot fly on his own, so Palutena grants him the power of flight each time, but only for about five minutes. This story limitation also solved a pacing problem: the flights end before they can become tiring or turn into repetitive shooting.
The player moves Pit with the Circle Pad, aims with the stylus, and fires with the L button. The route is fixed, but players can still dodge attacks, choose targets, and look for a safer position within it.
The rules change after landing. Pit can run freely through the level, search for secrets, open doors, and fight regular enemies and bosses. Weapons also behave differently at close and long range.
Sakurai deliberately limited the game to three basic actions: moving, aiming, and attacking. Yet a fairly complex system grew from that simple foundation. The game has nine weapon types, and individual weapons differ in their statistics and additional properties. Weapons can be earned in battle, fused together, and carried into multiplayer.
Another important idea is the difficulty scale from 0.0 to 9.0. Before starting a chapter, players wager some of the hearts they have collected, which serve as the game's currency. The higher the difficulty, the more dangerous the enemies and the more valuable the rewards. Losing costs part of the wager and lowers the difficulty.
It is a rare case where the difficulty selection menu becomes part of the game itself. Uprising does not simply ask which mode you want; it constantly tempts you to take a slightly bigger risk.
The Controls People Still Argue About
If there was one aspect of Uprising that caused more debate than any other, it was the controls.
The left hand holds the console and moves Pit, while the right hand rapidly moves the stylus across the lower screen. On the ground, the camera is spun with short, sharp swipes, almost like a heavy ball: give it a push, let it rotate, and stop it with a touch.
Sakurai believed that conventional dual-analog controls would not provide the necessary speed and precision. The touch screen allowed players to turn almost instantly and move the reticle from one side to the other. Once players became accustomed to the control scheme, Uprising really did become extremely fast.
But it did not suit everyone. Some players adjusted and never wanted to return to slow turning, while others found their hands becoming tired after a few chapters. Holding a standard 3DS in the air while keeping the stylus pressed against the screen was particularly uncomfortable.
That is why Nintendo included a plastic stand in the box. It allowed the console to rest on a table and took the strain off the left hand. The idea for the stand emerged during development, although the decision to bundle it with every copy was not made immediately.
Around the same time, Nintendo released the Circle Pad Pro for the 3DS, a bulky accessory with a second analog pad. It seemed as though it would finally allow Uprising to control like a conventional shooter, but that did not happen. The second pad was used only for a mirrored control scheme, allowing left-handed players to hold the stylus in their left hand and control the character with their right.
At first, the lack of proper dual-analog controls was often explained by the accessory being announced too late for the developers to support it. Sakurai later clarified another, more important reason. The game already used almost all of the 3DS's capabilities, and there was not enough processing headroom left to handle the second stick independently and implement a new aiming system.
In other words, the Circle Pad Pro really was revealed late, but timing was not the only issue.
A Game That Talks to You
Uprising's story could not be presented through conventional lengthy cutscenes. During aerial combat, players must watch the screen constantly, and on the ground they need to find their way and fight off enemies. Stopping the action every few minutes for another video would have destroyed the pacing.
That is why the characters talk during gameplay.
Pit argues with Palutena, villains interrupt their conversations, and the cast jokes about video game rules and comments on what is happening on screen. Palutena also gives directions and explains how the world works, but she never becomes a faceless navigation voice. She has a personality, moods, and secrets of her own.
Sakurai wrote the entire script. He did not want to reduce the story to a simple battle between good and evil, so he gradually introduced new sides to the conflict. Characters who initially appear to be enemies may have perfectly reasonable goals, while the heroes' certainty that they are right is repeatedly challenged.
Nintendo / Kid Icarus: Uprising / nintendo.com
The game is considerably longer than its initial premise suggests. It is better not to explain in advance exactly where the story goes after the first few chapters. One of Uprising's greatest pleasures is the sense that the developers keep pulling another idea, character, or complete game mode out of their sleeve.
Medusa returns as a familiar enemy from the original Kid Icarus, but the story does not end with her. Hades, the new lord of the Underworld, appears later and quickly becomes one of the liveliest participants in the cast's constant arguments.
Another new character was Magnus, a mercenary who fights alongside Pit during several ground-based sequences and joins the conversations as the action unfolds.
Masaki Hirooka / Magnus conceptart.png / kidicaruswiki.org
Music for the Heavens and the Underworld
Uprising brought together an unusually large music team. Motoi Sakuraba, Yuzo Koshiro, Masafumi Takada, Noriyuki Iwadare, and Takahiro Nishi composed the score. Yasunori Mitsuda assisted with orchestration and organizing the recording sessions, while a large orchestra and choir performed the music.
The soundtrack was enormous, with more than seventy tracks and a total running time of roughly three and a half hours. The music needed to change along with the action. In the aerial battles, it is especially closely tied to what happens on screen: the score adapts to the route, enemy appearances, and transitions between scenes.
The composers did not try to make everything fit a single style. The game includes orchestral themes, rock, electronic music, and lighthearted comic motifs. That variety could have turned into a mess, but it suited Uprising perfectly, since the game itself constantly shifts between grandeur, jokes, and pure spectacle.
The Final Stage of Development
Even after several years of development, some ideas had to be removed.
During ground battles, the team tested a system that automatically pointed the camera toward the nearest enemy. It made aiming easier, but restricted the player's view and did not work well in fast fights against several enemies.
A separate mode consisting only of aerial battles was also discussed. It was abandoned because those sections were designed as carefully staged routes tied to specific chapters. Simply linking them into an endless sequence would not have been enough.
Three chapters were cut from the script. Sakurai did not reveal their contents, but explained that they were not essential to the main story. The team was already struggling to meet its deadlines.
Serious work on multiplayer battles began in the summer of 2010. The final game included the team-based Light vs. Dark mode and a standard free-for-all battle. Both used the same weapons players collected and created in the single-player campaign.
Nintendo / Kid Icarus: Uprising / nintendo.com
Development was completed by the end of January 2012. Two months later, Kid Icarus: Uprising finally reached stores.
The End of Project Sora
Project Sora closed on June 30, 2012, only three months after the game was released. The news looked alarming. The temporary company was dissolved, its employees dispersed, and Sakurai was already preparing to direct the next Super Smash Bros. with Bandai Namco.
At the time, it was easy to assume that Uprising had failed to meet expectations and Nintendo had immediately abandoned any plans for a sequel. There was no official explanation for Project Sora's closure, which made that conclusion seem even more plausible.
Later, however, the picture became clearer.
Project Sora had been created for a single project from the beginning, while Sakurai's personal company, Sora Ltd., continued operating. The closure of the temporary studio was not evidence by itself that the game had failed.
The sales figures do not support that theory either. By March 31, 2013, Kid Icarus: Uprising had sold 1.18 million copies. For the return of a series that had been silent for around two decades, that hardly looks like a disaster.
Another factor mattered more for any possible sequel. The team had been assembled specifically for one game and ceased to exist after release. Reassembling the same people was practically impossible.
That created a paradox. Nintendo managed to produce a major game without a permanent studio, but that was also why there was no team left to continue it.
Will There Ever Be a Sequel?
In 2012, Sakurai said directly that he did not plan to make a sequel himself. His next project was already Super Smash Bros., and Project Sora's temporary structure was poorly suited to producing another installment. He did not rule out the series ever returning and even joked that perhaps someone else would take it on in another 25 years.
His position softened later. In 2023, Sakurai said it was a shame that Uprising remained confined to Nintendo 3DS: he would like to play it on a larger screen with smoother graphics. But he immediately pointed to the main difficulty: the original team no longer exists.
As of July 2026, Nintendo has announced neither a sequel nor a port of Kid Icarus: Uprising to another system. Rumors of a remaster have appeared online several times, but none has received official confirmation.
The digital version can no longer be purchased from Nintendo eShop: sales of digital 3DS games ended on March 27, 2023. Nintendo disabled online features for 3DS games on April 8, 2024, so Uprising's online battles are no longer available. Local play between multiple systems continues to work.
Today, it is especially clear just how unusual the entire project was. Uprising was conceived for a console that was not yet finished, its first prototypes were built on computers and Wii, the game combined two different genres, and its development relied on a temporary team that disbanded soon after release.
The game is not without its drawbacks. The controls take time to learn, hands really can become tired, and the game's dependence on the 3DS's unique features now makes it difficult to bring the game to modern systems.
But that strangeness is exactly what made Kid Icarus: Uprising special. Sakurai did not try simply to modernize the old game. He took the series apart, kept Pit, Palutena, the mythological monsters, and the lighthearted humor, and then assembled them into something entirely new.
Pit opened his trailer with the words, “Sorry to keep you waiting.” More than sixteen years have passed, and that line has become relevant once again.
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