HAL Laboratory

HAL Laboratory, Inc. (株式会社ハル研究所, Kabushikigaisha Haru-kenkyūjo), also styled HALKEN, is a Japanese video game developer headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, closely affiliated with Nintendo throughout its history and often described as a second-party developer for the company.¹⁴¹⁵ It was founded on February 21, 1980 in the Kanda district of Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo.²¹⁸ The company is best known for creating the Kirby? series and co-creating the Super Smash Bros. series.¹⁴¹⁶

Origins and name

The company grew out of a group of computer enthusiasts who became friends around the personal-computer display corner that the Seibu Department Store’s flagship in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, opened in 1978 — the first such corner in Japan.¹⁴⁵ Among the hobbyists who gathered there each weekend to program was Satoru Iwata?, a graduate of the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s information-engineering department, who used the venue to teach himself programming and who bought a Commodore PET 2001 built around the 6502 CPU.⁵⁴ When one of the department store’s staff invited the assembled programmers to form a company, the result was HAL Laboratory.⁵ Its founding president was Mitsuhiro Ikeda.²

According to the company itself, HAL was originally a hardware business making peripherals for personal computers, gradually shifting toward software over the years.³ Early on it rented an apartment in Tokyo where members worked until midnight or later designing their own games.¹⁵ The studio’s first commercial products included peripherals such as a scanner and a trackball for the MSX? system.¹⁵²⁰

Two accounts of the company’s name circulate, both traceable to Iwata. In his 2005 keynote at the Game Developers Conference he suggested the name derived from HAL 9000?, the sentient computer of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey; in a later interview he said instead that “HAL was named as such because each letter put us one step ahead of IBM” — each of the letters H, A, and L falling one place before I, B, and M in the alphabet.¹⁴³ Its current logo, “Inutamago” (from inu, dog, and tamago, egg), depicts a dog incubating a trio of eggs, a symbol meant to convey that what hatches from the company is unknown and surprising.³¹⁴

Early games and the turn to Nintendo

HAL’s earliest games were written for the simple home computers of the era, including the MSX and the Commodore 64.¹¹³ Among them were an arcade-derived racer, Le Mans (1982) for the Commodore 64, and a port of Namco’s Pac-Man released briefly in the West for the VIC-20 as Jelly Monsters, which Atari, the North American license holder, forced off the market.²⁰¹ The most consequential of these early efforts was the Eggerland? series, a block-pushing puzzle series begun with Eggerland Mystery (1985) on the MSX and starring the blue spherical character Lolo.²⁰¹⁵

The company also produced the sound-board software GSX-8800, released in January 1983, which Iwata developed together with a high-school-age contributor whose hardware HAL had agreed to sell.⁴ The relationship with Nintendo began when Iwata, in his second year at the company, heard of Nintendo’s forthcoming Family Computer and travelled to Kyoto to ask that HAL be allowed to develop for it.¹⁴ Nintendo instead set HAL to finish one of its own overdue projects, and the studio’s early Nintendo work included the Famicom/NES version of Pinball (1984).¹⁵²⁰ HAL ported its Eggerland games to Nintendo hardware as the Adventures of Lolo? series and produced original titles as well as licensed games such as the Japan-only New Ghostbusters II.¹¹⁴

The studio was credited inconsistently in this period, appearing as HAL Laboratory, HALKEN, and — through a North American subsidiary based in Oregon — HAL America.¹⁵¹⁶²⁰

Kirby, Nintendo, and Iwata’s presidency

By 1992 the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, in part following the commercial failure of the 1991 adventure game Metal Slader Glory.¹³ That same year a then-white puffball debuted in Kirby’s Dream Land? on the Game Boy, and Nintendo invested heavily in the studio, tying the two companies together and making HAL as close to a subsidiary as possible without formally becoming one.¹¹³ Iwata took office as president in March 1993, his appointment reportedly a condition of Nintendo’s rescue.²¹³ He later left HAL to become president of Nintendo.¹⁴

Kirby? and the Super Smash Bros. series were both created by Masahiro Sakurai, who joined HAL as a game designer after an interview in which Iwata was one of the panel.⁷¹⁴ Sakurai has recounted that on Super Smash Bros. his method was to write the programming specifications for each character’s moves and then, once programmers exposed those values as adjustable parameters, to perform all the final balance tuning himself.⁷ HAL turned what had been a generic four-player fighting concept into a brawler featuring Nintendo characters, building a working demo before securing Nintendo’s approval.¹ HAL was the primary developer of the first Super Smash Bros. (1999) on the Nintendo 64 and of Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) on the GameCube.¹³⁷

Beyond those franchises, HAL co-developed EarthBound (released in Japan as Mother 2) with Ape Inc., produced Nintendo-console versions of SimCity, and worked on Pokémon spin-offs including Pokémon Snap.¹³¹ Its later original work includes the minimalist puzzle-platformer series Box Boy!?.²⁰⁹

Later structure

HAL established a research-and-development center in Yamanashi in April 1991 and a Tokyo R&D center in June 1999.² In July 2001 it set up the affiliate Warpstar, Inc., jointly owned in equal share with Nintendo to handle the Kirby license autonomously, in a manner comparable to The Pokémon Company.²¹³ The company marked the 40th anniversary of its founding in 2020.¹⁹

In August 2017 HAL launched a new brand, “HAL Egg,” to expand into smart devices and new markets, self-publishing titles such as Part Time UFO.²¹³ The presidency passed through several hands over the years — Tsuyoshi Ikeda in 1984, Iwata in 1993, Masayoshi Tanimura in 1999, Satoshi Mitsuhara in 2015, and Shigefumi Kawase, who became president in September 2018.²¹⁴ As of 2023 the company employed roughly 215 people.¹³

Alongside game development, HAL develops its own tools, scripting languages, and game engines in-house, and produces middleware for Nintendo platforms in conjunction with Nintendo itself.⁹³ During Nintendo’s GameCube era it developed the software library sysdolphin.³