It’s been almost 20 years since Metroid Prime debuted on the Nintendo GameCube, and since then, has yet to be surpassed as my favorite game of all time. With the recent talk of Metroid Prime 4’s rebooted development, and rumors of a remastered trilogy making its way to the Switch at some point in the future, I wanted to look back at the original game and how Retro Studios were able to adapt the series to the 3D era when no precedent had been set.
F O N D M E M O R I E S
It’s a bit of a running joke that my memory straight up sucks. I can’t remember a week back, let alone several years all the way back to my childhood and… Uh… Wait, what were we talking about? Anyway, I do have a very clear image of Christmas morning, 2002. The largest box under the tree elicited a sense of mystery, excitement, and anticipation as the time to open it grew near. Tearing away the wrapping paper and breaking open the box, my siblings and I peered inside like Link opening a treasure chest, to find a Nintendo GameCube along with ten or so games waiting for us. Super Mario Sunshine, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Star Fox Adventures, Animal Crossing, among others. One in particular stood out to me, though. A bounty hunter, clad in her iconic red and orange power armor, standing front and center in an ominous space station corridor. Samus Aran, the heroine I’d played as years ago in Super Metroid, a game that I was maybe a little in over my head playing at the time (my brother had to help me defeat Ridley. Years later I realized he wasn’t too hard at all and I was just a dumb kid who sucked at games. I’ve always felt I’ve had a keen sense of whether or not a game will be “my type”, even before playing it. The ability to just look at a game - maybe a screenshot or some footage - and just say to myself, “Yup, that’s my kinda jam.” Metroid Prime is maybe the first example of that I can recall.
For the next few months, between bouts of Super Smash Bros. Melee (of which my siblings soon grew tired of after I wouldn’t stop bugging them to play with me) and daily check-ins on my town in Animal Crossing, I was glued to Metroid Prime. It was the first time a game’s world and lore took the experience one step further and become integral to why I enjoyed it so much. Several times since then, I’ve revisited it, usually playing through from beginning to end but sometimes only just dipping my toes, and it’s still one of the few games that can elicit that same childlike wonder from that Christmas morning
I M P O S S I B L E E X P E C T A T I O N S
The term “Metroidvania” has become increasingly popular over the last decade or so, it’s surge in usage coinciding with the rise of the indie game scene. Titles like Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight have taken the genre and breathed new life into it, thanks to the democratization of game development and the ability for smaller developers to get noticed on various digital storefronts. However, the origin of the term can be traced back further, to 1994 with the release of Super Metroid on the SNES (the second half of the puzzle coming in 1997 and the release of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night). The original Metroid on NES and Metroid II on Game Boy messed with interconnected, open environments but it wasn’t until Super that those elements truly came into form.
Fast forward eight years and Metroid has been missing since the release of Super, passing by the Nintendo 64 entirely. Fans would have to wait until 2002 and the GameCube to see how Nintendo would bring Samus Aran and the sci-fi adventure series to an entirely new dimension. The answer was outsourcing development to a western based team named Retro Studios, along with giving the series a shiny new first person perspective. It was a divisive decision, and one that was by no means a guaranteed success. Questions began to arise: How would Prime be able to apply an entirely new dimension to Super’s world design? How would a first-person Metroid control in a console era where there was still wasn’t standardized control scheme? (What the hell do we do with this second analog stick, anyway?) Was Nintendo making the right choice handing off one of their most notable franchises to a new studio and could it pay off?
The team at Retro had big shoes to fill, following up what was widely considered one of the SNES’ greatest games. I’m not sure anyone could have predicted that in the eyes of some they would actually surpass those expectations.
T H E M E T R O I D R E C I P E
There were three key things that Retro Studios needed to absolutely nail when adapting the series to a modern, 3D environment: exploration, isolation, and an emphasis on discovery. Despite Samus Aran’s vast (and mostly lethal) array of tools at her disposal, the series always put the spotlight on its large, interconnected environments that loop around, diverge, and rejoin at multiple points allowing you access areas in more ways than one. It’s not uncommon for these points to be hidden via secret entrances, blocked by obstacles, or locked away behind seemingly impenetrable barriers. Acquiring new abilities and tools to bypass these various hurdles is a staple of the “Metroidvania” archetype. Ditching it entirely, or even just failing to adapt it to a new format, would have been a major blow to the game’s success.
Metroid Prime takes place on the planet Tallon IV, an isolated world home to several ecosystems wrought with sentient lifeforms varying in shape and size. Ancient ruins of a long lost civilization? Check. Fiery depths and lava filled caverns? Check. Snowy mountain valleys and frozen lakes? Triple check. At face value these sound like generic, boilerplate themes that have been in games for ages, but Retro was able to take those video game-y concepts and breathe new life into them. Tallon IV feels like a real, dare I say “lived in” world (I know, I’m sorry) filled with life unique to their respective habitats. Everything feels like it’s placed with purpose not only to serve the gameplay, but to flesh out the world itself. Tallon IV is as much a character in Metroid Prime as Samus herself.
And when I say Tallon IV is a character unto itself, I really mean that. You’re given plenty of opportunities to learn more about the planet and events that transpired on it via what is maybe my favorite aspect of Metroid Prime: the scan visor. Almost every single object of note within the world, whether it’s an enemy, a computer terminal, or even a regular old supply crate, can be scanned. This gives you an avalanche of, at times, exhaustively detailed information. In the opening moments of the game, you encounter the corpses of several dead Space Pirates aboard a space station. Every single one of them can be scanned to retrieve everything from their biological information to their cause of death, giving you insight on what to expect in the future. This level of detail is par for the course throughout the entire game, and feeds into what I mean by saying that not only is the world itself a character within the larger narrative, but why every object placement feels intentional rather than random or just to fill up space. There are hundreds of entries to find, and they all load into a codex that you’re free to read up on at anytime in the game.
This kind of meticulous detail is something you don’t always see in games, and Retro deserves recognition for filling every corner of Prime with something worth finding. I’d argue Metroid Prime is among the games that laid a lot of groundwork for modern environmental storytelling. The kind of stuff that became synonymous with games like Dark Souls or BioShock.
While not having a wide cast of characters to invest in would probably be a deal breaker for a lot of games, it’s in fact not only a positive to Metroid Prime but essential. You are alone, and nobody’s coming to back you up, simple as that. The series has broken away from this ideology in more experimental titles like Fusion (sometimes successful) and Other M (sometimes, uhh, less successful), but that sense of loneliness and fear (or curiosity) of the unknown is at the core of Prime. Every environment just oozes atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife. The ambient sounds of Tallon IV’s rainforest surface, the rain dropping all around you, and Kenji Yamamoto’s eery compositions filling the gaps makes for an unforgettable experience.
On the subject of Yamamoto, long-time composer for the series, his work on Metroid Prime plays a significant role in getting across the tone and atmosphere of Tallon IV. Its unique blend of ambiance, techno, and X-Files-esque synth (that whistle) make a collection of music very much with its own identity. In addition to more context sensitive tracks, every major area has its own distinct theme that both fits with the theme of that environment, while staying true to the overarching style of the soundtrack. It’s unified without ever coming off as samey. I can pick just about any theme from this game and have it immediately stuck in my head. It’s that catchy and memorable, and I think that says a lot.
This idea of unifying under the same umbrella while still being diverse and unique carries through to the visual aesthetic of the game. Retro’s art team shows they understand what makes Metroid unique while still being okay with experimenting and adding upon that foundation. Tallon IV is a beautiful mishmash of sci-fi space stations and old-world ruins of a long past civilization. It marries the two worlds and blurs the line without ever leaning too far in one direction or another. When the GameCube came out, Prime was the game you booted up to show friends and be like, “Look at what this thing can do”.
Metroid Prime’s atmosphere to this day is among the top of its class. There’s nothing quite like treading into a new environment, unsure of what dangers might lurk in tall grass or hang from above, ready to murder the shit out of you (or maybe just scare it out of you). It’s a huge part of what keeps you going. The variety in what you can experience feeds that curiosity. It makes walking through every new door exciting. It’s all paced so well, giving you a drip feed of new stuff, carrot on a stick style, that never feels forced. There’s a flow to the progression that causes it to sort of just melt away around you. I had countless nights of lost hours, exploring the depths of what Tallon IV has to offer, coming back up for air only when the sun had risen and I realized I’d maybe missed a little bit of sleep.
Of course, even your favorite game of all time isn’t infallible, and I should probably bring myself down from this positivity high with some cold, hard, and (somewhat) negative facts. This game is divisive in a couple of notable ways.
Probably most notable being the control scheme. As I said previously, first person shooters on consoles were still relatively uncharted territory. (Halo: Combat Evolved had come out the previous year and would become the standard for control schemes going forward, but that probably wouldn’t have given Retro enough time to completely scrap what they’d put in place and start fresh). While these days you automatically assume the right analog stick will control your camera / perspective, in Prime’s case it was how you switched weapons. Sure, that makes sense, I guess? Your vertical axis was locked at all times, and you could only look up or down with a combination of the right trigger and the left stick. (A light press of the trigger to free look, and a hard click to lock that view into place). To say it was weird would be generous, but back then it wasn’t as conspicuous. These days if you tried to pitch your brand new first person shooter with that control scheme, you’d either be lavished by praise from the four people who liked those controls (Yeah, I’m one of them), or get your ass laughed out of the room. The trilogy on Wii fixed that issue by applying Metroid Prime 3’s motion controls to the first two games, but screw that. I’m an idiot and I hate change.
If you can wrap your head around the weird controls long enough to get through 99% of the game, you’ll be met with the last 1% that is now asking you to go back to all the areas you’ve already been to and find some very well hidden collectibles to unlock the final area. Yeah, mandatory fetch quest; Nintendo seems to really like doing this, if Wind Waker is any indication. Fortunately, unlike in Wind Waker, you can actually find a good number of these items - if not all of them - before they even become mandatory. Metroid prides itself on exploration - backtracking being a big part of that - so I personally never took umbrage with it but I also really can’t fault people that do. It’s a dumb thing, especially to have waiting at the very end of the game.
Of course, awkward controls and some mandatory backtracking are small prices to pay when the rest of what you’re getting is so cohesive, well crafted, and just plain fun. I’ve drifted from the Metroid series a bit over the last few years, my love of the series still living on in newer games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne, but the talk of Prime 4 has kind of rekindled my excitement for the series. I truly hope Retro can recapture the magic of the original trilogy, and more specifically, the original game and those feelings I had seventeen years ago.
Seventeen years. Holy shit, I’m old.
Great post - and a nice walk down memory lane for me, too.