Retro Studios talks Metroid Prime, Super Metroid

Nov. 29 11:27 AM by Alicia Ashby

Lots of people are linking to Gamasutra's great interview with Retro Studios' Michael Kelbaugh (President and CEO) and Mark Pacini (game director). That is probably because it's a thoroughly awesome and illuminating look at how Retro Studios was able to take the fan-favorite Metroid franchise from a 2D classic to a 3D sensation with the Metroid Prime games.

Click on the cut to see a pull-out of some of the most interesting quotes, and a few videos that show the gameplay evolution from Super Metroid to Metroid Prime 3. Be sure to read the whole interview if you can, watch the vids, then run out and play the utterly excellent Metroid Prime 3: Corruption if you haven't!

According to Kelbaugh, it wasn't easy getting started. We started in 1999 with about, at the apex of Retro Studios, about 120 employees. By 2000, we were working on four projects -- thats a pretty short time to ramp up so quickly and be working on so many projects. And honestly speaking, we did a few things wrong. By the end of 2001, all of the projects other than Metroid Prime where cancelled."
"We didn't want to make just another first person shooter," said Kelbaugh. "We wanted to bring the morph ball into 3D. We wanted to bring the screw attack into 3D. Making a first person shooter would have been a cheap and easy way to go. But making sure the themes and concepts in Metroid were kept was something that we wanted to do. And translating those things into 3D was a real challenge. For example, translating the morph ball was one of the hardest things to do."
"The game [Metroid Prime 2: Echoes] was too damn hard. And gamers got lost too easily, too. Now, we know that Metroid games are tuned differently in Japan compared to how they are tuned for the Western market, and while in Japan gamers dont mind being lost, western gamers much prefer to know where they're going. They find no pleasure in finding their way. They'd rather r know where to go... and we found that Echoes wasn't tuned to truly fit the needs of each kind of gamer."

Now, onto the videos! First, a demonstration of both the classic morph ball and screw attack Kelbaugh mentions as they appeared in Super Metroid (which is really just NES Metroid with bigger sprites and more awesome). This is from Red Scarlet's great 100%, 55-minute speed run of the game.

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Next, here's a Metroid Prime 3 vid that shows off the 3D versions Retro developed of both abilities. The morph ball debuted in Metroid Prime, and the screw attack in Metroid Prime 2. This said, the screw attack was tremendously glitchy in Metroid Prime 2, and not quite as elegantly implemented as it is in Prime 3. Likewise, Prime 3's morph ball behaves more or less identically to Prime's.

One thing for purists to note is that the screw attack's behavior in Metroid Prime 3 is technically more like a combination of the classic screw attack and space jump power-ups as they appeared in Super Metroid. The power-ups did appear individually in Metroid Prime 2, but this seemed to contribute to a lot of the glitchiness with that game's version of the screw attack. Combining them for Prime 3 feels much better to use in that game's 3D environment.