How did Metroid Prime happen?
A dying Texas studio, a visit from Miyamoto, and a cancelled game with a woman at its centre.
In 2000, Shigeru Miyamoto visited Retro Studios, Nintendo’s new subsidiary in Austin, Texas, and disliked every project on its slate. One prototype held his attention: a third-person science-fiction action game with a female protagonist. Retro scrapped it, and Miyamoto handed them Metroid instead.
THE MAKING
2000 to 2002One project standing
Retro’s other games were cancelled one by one in the studio’s rocky first years. Metroid Prime was the project that survived the cull, absorbing the team and the studio’s future with it.
"First-person adventure"
Nintendo refused the label "first-person shooter". The translation of Super Metroid into 3D kept the series’ grammar: scanning instead of shooting galleries, upgrades as keys, a planet read like a text. The visor is the argument made playable.
The result
Released November 2002: 2.84 million copies, a 97 on Metacritic, multiple Game of the Year awards, and the best-selling Metroid for nineteen years, until Dread passed it.
The sound of continuity
Nintendo asked Super Metroid’s Kenji Yamamoto to compose, specifically to carry the series’ musical DNA into 3D. Retro’s sound team worked to a 6 MB budget for all of a level’s effects; every sound had to earn its place.