How was the first Metroid made?
A free-form R&D1 experiment: Mario’s jump, Zelda’s maze, Alien’s dread.
Metroid was built inside Nintendo’s oldest game division, Research & Development 1, with help from Intelligent Systems, under producer Gunpei Yokoi. The brief the team set itself was a shooter that did not scroll in a straight line: a world you could get lost in, where new tools, not new levels, opened the way forward.
THE CREDITS
Who did what, 1986Direction · Satoru Okada
Okada directed, with Masao Yamamoto. The scenario came from Makoto Kano, who also created Samus as a character.
Design · Hiroji Kiyotake
Kiyotake designed the characters, Samus above all: the suit, the cannon, the silhouette. Hirofumi Matsuoka and the young Yoshio Sakamoto, credited as "Shikamoto", worked alongside him.
Sound · Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka
Tanaka composed, and did more: he gave input on graphics and helped name the areas. His score is deliberately un-hummable, a living organism rather than a tune.
The influence · Alien
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) was, in Sakamoto’s words, a "huge influence" once the world existed; H. R. Giger’s creature design fit its mood. The chief Pirate is named Ridley in acknowledgment.
THE TWIST
Decided halfway through"Wouldn’t it be cool if…"
Partway through development, a member of the team asked the room: wouldn’t it be a twist if the person inside the suit were a woman? The idea went in. Both the Japanese and English manuals still wrote about Samus as "he".
Five endings
The game grades your clear time with five different ending screens. Only the fast ones take the helmet off. The timer turned a 1986 adventure into one of the first speedrun games, a decade before the word existed.
The name
"Metroid" is a portmanteau of metro and android: the transit tunnels of an underground world, and the machine-suited hunter moving through them.