Mega Man, Castlevania, and Mario: Digging through Shovel Knight's retro inspirations

Shovel Knight obviously looks like an 8-bit game from the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it borrows a lot more than pixels from that era’s classics.

Of course, Shovel Knight took all of that inspiration and created something great, but it’s still fun to take a close look at each retro adventure and see exactly what the recent action-platformer for the Wii U, 3DS, and PC borrowed from it.