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Bird Week

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The player plays as a bird and can either play the normal game or the single level practice game. The player must feed butterflies to the baby birds so that they can grow big and eventually leave the nest. It is suggested that they eventually become the "new mother birds" that take care of their ...

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Developer
Lenar

Released on
1986

Size
1 Player

Version
NES

Requirements
Nintendo Entertainment System

Downloads
Action

Publisher
Toshiba-EMI

ESRB Rating
Not Rated

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Description

The player plays as a bird and can either play the normal game or the single level practice game. The player must feed butterflies to the baby birds so that they can grow big and eventually leave the nest. It is suggested that they eventually become the “new mother birds” that take care of their offspring in the subsequent levels. Finishing all 999 levels of Bird Week actually results in the beginning of an endless loop instead that ends when the players loses all of his lives.

Each level represents a season in the ecosystem of a bird. The game starts out in early spring. As the virtual year progresses, the season evolves into summer and eventually into autumn. After autumn, the game repeats itself by portraying the following spring. If the proper amount of butterflies are not fed to the babies, then the babies end up starving to death. The player will automatically lose a life if any of the baby birds die. In addition to this, the player also loses a life when a predator catches the player trying to deliver butterflies to whose baby.

Bird Week

Overview & History

Released by Toshiba EMI in 1986 for the Famicom and later ported to the MSX, Bird Week is a quirky, deceptively frantic ecological survival action game. Eschewing traditional platforming tropes, the game casts you as a dedicated mother bird navigating a hazardous suburban ecosystem. Your sole purpose is to gather enough caterpillars and spiders to feed your perpetually starving hatchlings nestled safely in a high tree branch before the timer runs out. Despite its colorful, deceptively cute, and innocent presentation, Bird Week is infamous among retro enthusiasts for its punishing difficulty curve, unforgiving collision detection, and sheer mechanical panic, making it a cult classic of the mid-80s Japanese console era.

Gameplay Features & Mechanics

The core gameplay loop revolves around a delicate balancing act of foraging, hunting, and defensive maneuvering across fixed single-screen stages. You must aggressively hunt crawling insects while constantly evading airborne predators like hawks, cats, and rival birds that actively try to steal your meals or knock you out of the sky. Successfully snagging a caterpillar requires precision timing; once caught in your beak, you must fly it back to the nest to feed your chicks. However, carry weight and momentum matter—overshooting the nest drops your precious cargo. Each cleared stage introduces tougher predator AI, tighter time limits, and increasingly erratic insect patterns, demanding absolute spatial mastery.