Play Gimmick! Online

Summary

Gimmick! was Sunsoft’s bold attempt to squeeze next‑gen polish out of an aging Famicom. Director Tomomi Sakai assembled a surprisingly large team and forced the hardware to behave like a mini‑Super Famicom by splitting the 256‑tile graphics pool into clever groups of 128 and then 64, letting the game swap detailed background cogs and floor animations without choking the processor. The result is a visual style that still feels unusually crisp for an 8‑bit platformer.

The soundtrack is where the game truly shines. Composer Masashi Kageyama was given Sunsoft’s custom SUNSOFT 5B chip – a Yamaha YM2149 that added three extra audio channels – and he turned it into a genre‑spanning mixtape of pop, acid‑jazz, hard‑rock and fusion. He even wired his Macintosh synth into a telephone line to demo ideas to Sakai, treating each track like a puzzle that had to sound live and beautiful despite the console’s limits. The European NES version lost those extra channels, but the original Famicom score remains a benchmark for NES music.

Gameplay revolves around Yumetaro’s horn‑mounted star, which doubles as a weapon and a temporary platform. Six stages and six bosses hide a secret item each, forcing players to master the star’s physics and the game’s notoriously tight controls. The difficulty spikes dramatically toward the end, a design choice Sakai later blamed on casual players who couldn’t handle the precision required.

Only a handful of copies ever left Japan, thanks to Swedish distributor Bergsala’s tiny “Mr. Gimmick” run in 1993. Critics were split – some dismissed the cute aesthetic, others praised the visuals, sound and challenge. Decades later, retrospectives from GameSpot and IGN have crowned it a sleeper hit, noting its gorgeous graphics, innovative physics and the love poured into every pixel.

Storyline

Gimmick! follows the tale of a small green creature named Yumetaro, a doll given to a young girl on her birthday. The girl quickly makes Yumetaro her favorite, leaving her five older toys feeling abandoned.
One night the neglected toys come to life, whisk the sleeping girl away to an alternate dimension, and leave Yumetaro behind. Determined to rescue his new owner, Yumetaro sets off after them.
As the player you guide Yumetaro through the strange world, battling six bosses and, if you collect every magic item without using a continue, unlocking a secret stage with an extra boss. Defeating this final foe triggers a cutscene in which Yumetaro saves the girl and returns her to the real world.