Morph ball – Metroid Prime

I didn’t own a Nintendo console before the Wii, and while I played some of their games by other means, I caught up on a big section of the canon on the Wii’s Virtual Console. Out of all of the classics I played for the first time, the one which I found the greatest experience, and have come back to most often since, was SNES game Super Metroid. Some of this was the peculiar refracted nostalgia that came from having grown up on the Metroid-imitating 2D side-on platform-shooter Turrican, but mostly it was that Super Metroid felt so balanced and complete and confident in its world. Controlling its heroine Samus felt like a joy in its own right in the same way as Mario’s jump, but with that joy spread across a more complex range of movements and actions, which the game gave full opportunity to explore and enjoy. And exploring was its key notion in other ways, its planet a living place that gave up wonders and dangers alike, posing new mysteries alongside each new discovery. A sequel that captured the same feelings would go on to be the least obvious of the Nintendo GameCube’s few big successes.

By 2003, after the PlayStation 2’s phenomenally successful 2002, it was clear that the GameCube had no chance of competing in popularity. However, three of its games did manage to reach #1 in the UK charts, and all three of them were continuations of Nintendo series which had been around on their consoles since the NES in the mid-’80s. Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid. But for all of Super Metroid’s excellence, one of those things is not like the others. Mario and Zelda got massive, defining games on the Nintendo 64, and their Gamecube follow-ups were handled by Nintendo EAD, its core internal department. The Nintendo 64 had no Metroid game at all, and the opportunity to continue the series got handed to a developer that had never released a game before. That situation turned out to be the making of Retro Studios and Metroid Prime.

Super Metroid is a highly celebrated game, but its commercial success at the time was not universal. In the USA, it was the country’s bestselling game for two months. In the UK, the SNES was largely irrelevant, but Super Metroid wasn’t even a big fish in that tiny pond. More importantly, in Japan, it entered the charts behind fellow new releases J-League Super Soccer and Shin Megami Tensei II and fell from there. That, presumably, is why when its director Yoshio Sakamoto couldn’t imagine how to create an N64 Metroid, and an unnamed other company also turned it down, Nintendo weren’t bothered to take things any further. From their domestic point of view, it was way down their list of important series. 

• 

• 

• 

It also then makes sense that when Nintendo took on a new American developer, Retro Studios, and had a look at a bunch of their early ideas that weren’t working out, they took a punt on asking Retro to make a new Metroid game, with a first person perspective. Fans expressed initial doubts, as they tend to do, but the result was another acclaimed game which also far outsold Super Metroid. Retro’s staff came from different companies, but many of them were familiar with making first person shooters. From there, it seems, came the technical know-how to craft Metroid Prime’s combat, smooth movement and impressive 3D visuals. But Retro were not tasked with making a Metroid-themed first person shooter. Effectively, they were tasked with bringing Super Metroid into 3D, maintaining its appeal while changing its basic tenets in ways at least as significant as Super Mario 64 had done to Mario’s. 

In replicating the joy of exploration and density of possibility, Retro made some very smart decisions to deal with the inherent added complexity of an extra dimension. Long corridors serve nicely to help disguise load times but also make the space more navigable. The interactive map is a brilliant creation, keeping the spirit of Super Metroid’s simple grid while showing 3D space, crucially just providing the outline shape of each room and the type of doors into it. And the spaces themselves are evocative ones, starting with the ruins you explore where corridors are slanted away from upright, an early example of the decay and ruin which characterises many of the game’s spaces.

The map has names for rooms, not just for areas like Super Metroid did, and Metroid Prime provides a lot more information in general. It’s a switch in emphasis which runs right through the game. You can switch at any time from Samus’s combat visor to her scan visor, and objects which you can download information on are highlighted. The deciding factor in what reward you receive on completing the game is not how fast you have completed it like in previous Metroid games, but thoroughly you have captured every available piece of information (it also, incidentally and positively, switches away from using Samus in progressive states of undress as that reward).

Mystery that comes through from gradually finding bits of writing about mysteries is a different prospect from the super austere Super Metroid, but Metroid Prime’s writing is sparing enough for the comparison not to be embarrassing. And the places are gorgeous enough to carry a lot of the weight themselves. Phenandra Drifts’ combination of immaculate music and pristine snow-covered distances makes for a wonderful contrast to the places you struggle through to get there, before slowly revealing its own dangers. Metroid Prime does get a bit dorky in places — the volcanic caves being called Magmoor, the chosen one narrative, a boss taken directly from Galaxy Quest — but, well, it’s an update to an Alien-inspired series that called its terrifying dragon-thing Ridley. Dorky is not exactly out of keeping.

That sense of being a different thing but in the same spirit goes for how Samus moves, too. First person platforming has never been a very satisfying venue for precision, and Metroid Prime generally errs on the side of forgiving, especially once you get a double jump and can finesse landings further. It doesn’t have the same sense of choreographing Samus into movements which precisely navigate spaces as Super Metroid had, although anywhere you switch into the third person view of the morph ball and back comes close. Instead, it immerses you further into a range of ways of interacting with the environment, with different visors and weapons changing the display you see the world through. The sense of being inside Samus’s suit, interface manipulations at your fingertips, gives the same joy of control as Super Metroid through different means.

That approach of understanding the spirit of Super Metroid but not being bound to all of its details is key to Metroid Prime, and it’s not hard to see the game’s unusual development background as a catalyst for it. It makes me think of a success story from a different world, that of Leicester City Football Club, unlikely Premier League champions of 2015-16. The previous season, newly promoted Leicester started badly but rallied to survival and excellent form by the end. Normally, manager Nigel Pearson would have therefore been expected to stay on. Instead, he was sacked for other reasons (including presiding over a tour of Thailand during which players including his son filmed a ‘racist orgy’) and Claudio Ranieri was brought in to a reaction at least as underwhelming as that to Retro’s appointment in charge of Metroid. But Leicester were positively transformed, not so much in spite of that upheaval as because of it. They won the league on the back of a new manager bringing a new energy to an already successful setup. 

If the same team that built Super Metroid had been the ones to turn it into 3D, they may well not have been as bold as Retro were. But being constrained by staying within the spirit of a successful game is a nice problem to have. Not long after Metroid Prime’s success, Team Ninja and Tecmo would similarly reap the rewards of Ninja Gaiden taking a break and then being placed into new hands (Team Ninja would go on to show with the failure of Metroid: Other M that lightning doesn’t always strike twice). A success normally means the same people in charge getting another go, but for Metroid Prime new builders working with strong foundations made an excellent new experience.

---

Top of the charts for week ending 22 March 2003:

• 

• 

• 

• 

•