IIn 2002, a group of five Italians made local news: they were going to be the first company in the country to develop a game for Nintendo’s popular handheld device, the Game Boy Advance. The group pooled a few hundred euros and some computers to prepare the project. They had no experience in making games. They didn’t even have a programmer. All they had was a love of video games, a shared hatred of working for bosses, and endless optimism.
For the next two years, the group worked hard. Late nights were common, and the team barely took any time off. It was a grueling time, but they were determined to create an ambitious game with complex features. Its name was Kien. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s because it never came out – until now. The action platformer didn’t see the light of day until this year, by which time most of the original team had long since left. Only one member of the group of five remained: game designer Fabio Belsanti, who never lost faith in the project.
Kien currently holds the record for the most delayed video game in history – 22 years, beating the 15-year journey of the infamous Duke Nukem Forever, a shooter that was delayed so long it became a meme. After all this time, people can now actually buy Kien, on a Game Boy Advance cartridge.
The game starts by asking the player to choose between two protagonists: a warrior and a priestess. The warrior can use a sword to kill his enemies, and there are many of them. I died repeatedly in that first level. There are a lot of skulls with armor, and they respawn after a short time. You can’t let your guard down in Kien, which is perhaps why Belsanti compares it to an ancient Dark Souls. It’s reminiscent of that one weird game you took a chance on as a kid, maybe because the artwork looked cool, or maybe it was the only thing left on the shelves at your local movie rental store.
A multi-decade release schedule was never the plan, of course. The game had been finished years ago and multiple publishers had expressed interest. After choosing one, Belsanti’s fortunes changed after Kien’s chosen publisher conducted a market analysis that determined his game was too risky to back. At the time, each Game Boy cartridge cost $15 to produce.
“The amount of capital required just to print the first copies was daunting, especially as the chances of commercial success were low, based on industry trends at the time,” Belsanti told the Guardian.
But despite this setback, Belsanti held on to hope. He had studied at the university in Tuscany, where he spent a year delving into archives of unpublished books from the 15th century. They were exciting stories about a mercenary company in the early Italian Renaissance, with knights, soldiers and squires – but due to their age, these stories are essentially lost in time. Kien was inspired by these stories, by the unusual graphic style of early Japanese games, and by action games like Turrican. Despite its age, Belsanti sees Kien as something of a pioneer, on a par with games like Dark Souls. The nonlinear fantasy game is unforgiving, but players are rewarded with a compelling story about a lost civilization.
While Kien languished in development limbo, the company Belsanti founded, AgeOfGames, had to find a way to survive. “The capitalist system is a brutal meat grinder,” he says, “which I have adapted to out of necessity, but I don’t like it.” The company found a niche in educational games. One of its biggest successes to date has been ScacciaRischi, a platformer developed for Italy’s INAIL, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people avoid injuries and illnesses at work. It’s been played by tens of thousands of students and has tackled topics like the Covid-19 pandemic.
AgeOfGames might have been able to continue down this path forever, but a shift in the gaming industry suddenly made Kien a possibility again. Over the past five years, a boom in the retro gaming scene has reinvigorated interest in outdated hardware and rare games that can fetch thousands on the resale market. Not only has the cost of producing GBA cartridges dropped, but companies have sprung up to meet the demand.
“I believe we are in a phase similar to [the revival of] “vinyl or cassettes for music,” Belsanti muses, “a return to earlier, more primitive forms of the medium, driven by nostalgia of the generations that lived in those eras, and curiosity of those who came after this technology.”
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Kein’s new publisher, Incube8, specializes in producing games for classic consoles – and is backing Kien. The game is now sold in a striking translucent gray cartridge. The game box also comes with a multi-page manual, a pack-in that has practically disappeared from modern games.
“On a romantic level, the idea of releasing the game on the original console is just magical,” Belsanti says. “Seeing Kien come to life on the platform it was designed for is a dream come true.”
AgeOfGames is already working on a spiritual successor. Just like more than 20 years ago, Belsanti hopes that the public will see the value in a game like Kien, even if it doesn’t have advanced graphics or fancy bells and whistles.
“The power of the video game experience can be, not always but in some cases, much more intense and powerful in old video games that were made with limited graphical and technical resources,” says Belsanti. “I will never forget the emotion I felt when I looked at the cover art of my Philips Videopac or Spectrum ZX or Commodore 64 video games, which had nothing to do with the pixels that appeared on the screen. My imagination created a bridge between the artwork and the pixels, filling every limitation and absence with fantastic stories.”