ROMance
A proposal that came with a walkthrough
Klax is a 20-year-old puzzle game available on more than 20 different platforms, from the Atari Lynx to the Commodore 64. Each version is essentially the same: Colored blocks roll along a conveyer belt, and the player has to stack and arrange them. But the Game Boy Color version had a singular mode: a marriage proposal embedded in an easter egg.
It was hidden there by Mike Mika, lead engineer and designer of the game. Klax was a big deal for him—it was to be a launch title for Nintendo’s new handheld, and tailoring the game to the new hardware required a lot of crunch time that kept him away from his live-in girlfriend Micki. “That’s how game design works,” he says. “You just disappear; you’re in the office 24/7. Girlfriends become widows.”
