Who is Yoshio Sakamoto to Metroid?
He drew Samus in 1986, directed her masterpiece in 1994, and was still producing her games thirty-five years later.
No Nintendo series has a single custodian quite like Yoshio Sakamoto. He enters the story as a young character designer, credited under the name "Shikamoto", and never really leaves it: director of Super Metroid and Fusion, the force behind Zero Mission and Other M, and producer of the MercurySteam revival.
THE RECORD
Four decades in one seriesDrafted in, 1986
Sakamoto has told the story himself: the first Metroid fell behind, and he was "forcefully asked to participate" by his superiors to rescue it. His fix, reusing existing assets to manufacture variety, became the series’ economy of design.
Director, 1994 and 2002
He directed Super Metroid, then wrote and directed Fusion, the two poles of the 2D series: total freedom, total structure. Between them sits his whole design philosophy, argued with itself.
The insistence
Other M’s NES-simple control scheme was his demand, pursued against the grain of 2010 game design. Dread was his unfinished business for fifteen years, cancelled twice rather than compromised. Sakamoto’s Metroid is a series of refusals to dilute.
The ruling
At Games Done Quick, the longest-running argument in the fandom is save or kill the animals. Sakamoto’s position, given with composer Yamamoto in 2017: save them. The director has spoken; the donations, rightly, ignore him half the time.