In 2002, a group of Italian friends began developing an action-platformer with RPG elements for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance handheld console. Then 22 years passed and today, in 2024, Kien finally launches on GBA, ending one of the longest delays in video game history.
Over the decades, many games have had extended development cycles and delayed releases. One of the most famous is Duke Nukem Forever, which was first announced in 1997 but didn’t actually release until 2011, nearly 15 years later. But Kien took even longer to arrive.
As reported by The Guardian and Patricia Hernandez (former EIC of Kotaku), Kien was developed by a small group of friends in Italy in 2002. None of them had any experience in creating games. But for the next two years, the friends worked extremely hard to develop Kien, taking very few breaks and working a lot. After a few years of development, the game was finished and ready for publication. However, the high costs of shipping the game on Game Boy cartridges and the risk that Kien would not be successful meant that no publisher wanted to release the game.
Eventually, only one member of the original development team remained: game designer Fabio Belsanti. Although he believed in the unpublished game, he moved on with his life, founded a new development company, and started creating educational games for children and teenagers. Despite all this, Belsanti never lost hope for Kien. When he recently noticed that retro games and consoles were popular again, he decided to come back to Kien and give it another chance.
“I think we are in a similar phase to [the revival of] “Vinyls or cassettes for music,” Belsanti told the Guardian, “a return to earlier, more primitive forms of the medium, driven by the nostalgia of the generations who lived through those times, and the curiosity of those who came after this technology.”
Belsanti partnered with Incube8, a publisher that specializes in releasing and supporting new games for classic consoles, like the GBA. Incube8 was a perfect fit for Kien and was finally launched in June, 22 years after the action-platformer began development.
“Romantically, the idea of releasing the game on its original console is simply magical,” Belsanti said. “Seeing Kien come to life on the platform it was designed for is a dream come true.”
Kien is now availableYou can get a physical version of the game for Game Boy Advance or purchase a digital version that you can play on an emulator.