Gimmick!

Gimmick! is an action-platformer that was released late in the Famicom's/NES' lifespan. Despite the game's cute appearance, it is punishingly difficult, but has gained a following due to its overall polished presentation and rewarding-to-master star attack that doubles as a platform for finding items necessary to get the game's good ending.

Unfortunately, the game was only released outside of Japan in Scandinavia, though at least one prototype has been found for the planned US release.

Sound Test


To access the music sampler, hold Select and press Start at the title screen. It contains every track in the game, with the exception of Evidence of My Life (later named in a separate OST) and an alternate version of Cadbury with slightly different instruments.

The round cursor color depends on bits 1 and 2 (a total of four different colors) of some music data, which don't frequently change and remain at zero most of the time with the exception of two music tracks: Strange Memories of Death and Paradigm. This color change only occurs in the Japanese version.

During Paradigm, the cursor will blink orange during the intro of the song. After the intro, the cursor will turn green during certain parts of the song.

For Strange Memories of Death, the cursor will remain green during the whole intro of the song. Before the song loops, the cursor will turn green during three measures of eight, high-pitched notes.

There is not much connected to it; the developers just selected not-so-frequently-changing data to highlight the cursor. If they had selected another piece of data, it may have been much more interesting.

Unused Music


The second track in the NSF, "Strange Memories of Death", goes unused in the game proper. It can be heard in the sound test, though.

Anti-Piracy


The game has a copy protection routine which is triggered if the intro code is tampered with (as is the case with the pirated version, Shui Guan Pipe) and the player makes it to the secret Stage 7. This prevents unsuspecting players from being able to advance to the final boss and see the good ending. The message displayed is a reference to Atlantis no Nazo, an earlier Sunsoft game.

See the Notes page for a detailed description of the copy protection code.

Playable Enemy
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One strangely still Ohagi in the interior portion of Stage 2 can actually be controlled using Controller 2, no hacking required! Left and Right makes it walk, and A makes it jump.

It will still do damage if it runs into the main character like any other enemy, and will not aid you in fighting off the other enemies in the room.

Yumetarō


This is found with the ending cutscene graphics of Yumetarō and the girl running away from the crumbling castle.

Text Characters and Symbols


A variety of unused text characters and symbols. The letter "A" takes up two tiles, and was intended to be used in a scrapped intro screen, documented below.

Unused Text
The European version of the game contains two unused intro text strings that were (mostly) overwritten in the Japanese version, which is rather odd, given the fact that the former is a later build of the game.

CK ENTERTAINMENT TEAM

Found at. This string was partially overwritten by the "AUTHENTIC ENTERTAINMENT" string used in the intro. The "CK" would seem to imply that it once said "GIMMICK ENTERTAINMENT TEAM".

    A TOMOMI SAKAI    GAME

Found at. Note that this uses a different spelling of designer Tomomi Sakae's last name. The letter "A" used in the first line is actually comprised of two tiles, both of which are only present in the Japanese version!

Only a small portion of this string, "TOMO", remains in the Japanese version; oddly enough, the aforementioned anti-piracy routine actually checks for the presence of these unused characters.

Lives
The Japanese version starts the player with four lives, whereas the European version and the identical US prototype offer nine lives instead. After the player scores 10,000 points, another life occurs at every subsequent 20,000 points rather than 25,000 points in the European version.

Music
The European version and US prototype have minor alterations to the music to make up for the missing extra sound chip.

Title Screen
This bit of Japanese text on the title screen – the only Japanese text in the entire game – was translated, because English-speaking people have seizures when they see symbols they don't recognize.