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Kirby Bowl (1994) - a golf game whose hero was swapped in late, while the original version only ever aired on Japanese satellite radio
Episode 62 of "Today Is Release Day": Kirby Bowl, released by Nintendo for the Super Famicom on September 21, 1994 - something between golf and billiards. It began as a different game called Special Tee Shot, whose hero was a red ball with eyes. In 1992 it reached magazine previews and even retail announcements in North America, then never shipped; two years later Kirby was dropped into it and out it went. Famitsu's Cross Review gave it 28 out of 40. The original project finally surfaced in 1996, broadcast only over Japan's Satellaview. Today the game turns 32.
Eggerland (1985) — The Original One-Room Puzzle Where You Push Your Enemies as Eggs
In 1985, a modest puzzle game appeared for the MSX home computer: Eggerland Mystery. Shoot an enemy to turn it into a pushable egg, then collect hearts to open the treasure box — a design built from just a handful of verbs, contained entirely within one room. HAL Laboratory refined that grammar across a run of Famicom Disk System titles, and in 1989 it crossed the ocean as Adventures of Lolo. Sitting in the producer's chair for those two years was a young Satoru Iwata, years before he became Nintendo's president.
Adventures of Lolo (1989) — The Emerald Framer and the Single Solution
In 1989 HAL Laboratory released Adventures of Lolo on the NES, distilled from the 1985 MSX title Eggerland Mystery. On an 11x11 board, pushable framers and moving enemies converge on a single solution. I read this Sokoban-descended single-screen logic puzzle as a node in a long genealogy, one that codified its ideas well before the modern grid-puzzle wave.
