Metroid Prime

• 1. Introduction

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  Metroid Prime first reached the public as a ten-second video at Space World 2000, a flicker of footage for a game that would not appear on shelves until 2002. When it did arrive on the GameCube, published by Nintendo, it carried the weight of a long silence. Its developer was Retro Studios of Austin, Texas, an American team entrusted with one of Nintendo's most cherished Japanese series. The game cast the bounty hunter Samus Aran on a hostile alien world, and it had to do something the series had never done: use 3D graphics. Why would Nintendo hand Samus to a young Texas studio? Why did a series with no first-person history move into the first-person view, while its makers insisted the result was not a shooter? And how did a game finished under punishing deadlines come to be counted among the finest ever made?

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• 2. Missing Metroid

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  Super Metroid came out in 1994, and then the series went quiet for eight years. The Nintendo 64 passed without a Metroid game. Shigeru Miyamoto later explained that the company "couldn't come out with any concrete ideas". Yoshio Sakamoto, a co-creator of the series, said he could not imagine how the Nintendo 64 controller could be used to steer Samus. Nintendo did approach another company about making one. The offer was declined, supposedly because those developers believed they could never equal Super Metroid.

  Retro Studios was formed in 1998 through an alliance between Nintendo and Jeff Spangenberg, the founder of Iguana Entertainment. Its mission was to make games for the coming GameCube, aimed at a mature audience. After setting up offices in Austin in 1999, the studio started on four GameCube projects. In 2000, Miyamoto visited the Austin headquarters and saw a prototype first-person shooter engine. He suggested that Retro build a new Metroid game with it.

  The studio's other plans did not survive. Across 2000 and early 2001, four games in development at Retro were canceled, among them an RPG called Raven Blade. That left Metroid Prime as the only game still being made. It would soon be reshaped by a decision from Miyamoto himself.

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• 3. The Camera Switch

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  Nintendo's Japanese staff and the Texas team split the work between them. Nintendo composed the music, while Retro handled art and engineering, and both groups contributed to the overall design. The Japanese side included the producers Miyamoto, Kensuke Tanabe and Kenji Miki, along with Sakamoto as designer. They kept in touch with Retro through e-mails, telephone conferences and personal gatherings.

  Retro had planned a third-person game. Then Miyamoto intervened, the perspective became first-person, and almost everything already built was thrown away. The trigger was trouble at Rare, which had struggled with camera problems on its Nintendo 64 game Jet Force Gemini. Director Mark Pacini said Miyamoto felt that "shooting in third person was not very intuitive". Pacini added that exploring is simply easier from a first-person view.

  Pacini says the team then refused to make a traditional first-person shooter. They had to break down the stereotypes of what a first-person game is. He wanted the only hard parts to be boss battles, so that players would not fear exploring, because "the challenge of the game was finding your way around". Senior designer Mike Wikan said this meant making platform jumping "approachable to the player". Shooting, he said, was "a very important, though secondary, consideration". Sakamoto supervised the storyline to keep it consistent with earlier games.

  Some ideas did not make the cut. Designer Gene Kohler modeled and skinned Kraid, a boss from Metroid and Super Metroid, but he was removed for time reasons. The team also weighed bringing back the Speed Booster from Super Metroid. They decided it would not suit the first-person view or the scale of the environments.

  The outside world learned of all this slowly. In November 2000, Retro confirmed its involvement through the job application section of its website. In February 2001, Nintendo announced the game and called it a first-person adventure rather than a first-person shooter. At E3 in May 2001, the title Metroid Prime was confirmed.

  The final stretch was brutal. For the last nine months, Retro's staff worked 80- to 100-hour weeks to hit Nintendo's deadline. Senior artist James Dargie recalled that the first level Nintendo approved took almost six months, leaving under a year for everything else. Concept artist Android Jones, a lifelong fan of the series, slept in the office and went back to work when he woke. His designs included Samus's Varia Suit and most of the art in the Scan Visor.

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• 4. Inside the Helmet

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  Players see Tallon IV through the inside of Samus Aran's helmet. The heads-up display shows a radar, a map, missile ammunition and a health meter. A danger meter warns of hazardous terrain or materials, and bosses get their own health bar and name. Swapping visors changes the view. One uses thermal imaging and another gives x-ray vision. The scanner hunts for enemy weaknesses and also works on mechanisms such as force fields and elevators.

  Unlike earlier games in the series, this one is played from a first-person perspective, with third-person elements only in Morph Ball mode. The gameplay mixes puzzle solving, platform jumping and gunfights. A lock-on mechanism lets Samus circle-strafe while keeping her aim on an enemy.

  The Morph Ball lets Samus compress herself to roll through narrow passages and drop bombs. The Grapple Beam latches onto special hooks called grapple nodes so she can swing across gaps. Boots allow a double-jump, and a Spider Ball upgrade lets her climb magnetic rails. The Varia Suit shields her armor from high temperatures, which opens the volcanic regions. Her four beam weapons do not stack their traits as in earlier games. The player cycles between them, and each has charge combos with radically different effects. Many items must be found in a fixed order, and some come from boss fights. Hidden upgrades increase her maximum ammunition and health.

  Samus starts with some upgrades, including the Varia Suit, Missiles and Grapple Beam. An explosion on the Space Pirate frigate Orpheon strips them away. The producers said starting with them gave players "different things to do" and a chance to learn each item's function before the core game began. This was one of the first Metroid games to explain why Samus loses her old equipment.

  A hint system gives clues about how to progress. Collecting a high percentage of items and Scan Visor logs unlocks art galleries and extra ending cutscenes. Link the game to Metroid Fusion with a GameCube - Game Boy Advance cable, and players can unlock Samus's Fusion Suit and an emulated copy of the original Metroid.

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• 5. A Fallen Civilization

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  Five decades before Samus arrives, the Chozo civilization on Tallon IV fell after a meteor struck the planet. The impact spread a corruptive, mutagenic substance that the Space Pirates later named Phazon. It also brought a creature the Chozo knew as "The Worm". The Chozo built a large containment field emitter in the Artifact Temple, in the Tallon Overworld area, to seal the crater against the meteor's energies. The Space Pirates try to disable or bypass it so they can extract Phazon. Twelve Chozo artifacts scattered around the planet control the field.

  Retro Studios wrote an extensive storyline, a major difference from earlier Metroid games. Short cutscenes play before important battles, and the scanner pulls backstory out of objects in the world. The first three Metroid Prime games sit between Metroid and Metroid II, while Metroid Prime 4: Beyond falls between Metroid: Other M and Metroid Fusion.

  The story opens shortly after Samus defeats Mother Brain and the Space Pirates on the planet Zebes. She picks up a distress signal from the Orpheon, whose crew were slaughtered by the Pirates' own genetically modified experiments. At the ship's core she fights the Parasite Queen, a giant version of the tiny parasites aboard. The queen falls into the reactor core, which starts the ship's destruction. Samus also meets Meta Ridley, a cybernetic Ridley, who escapes. She follows him to Tallon IV in her gunship.

  On the surface she finds the ruins of a Chozo settlement and learns that Phazon killed off the Chozo. She defeats a mutated plant creature that is poisoning the local water supply. She then crosses the Magmoor Caverns, magma-filled tunnels the Pirates tap for geothermal power. Next comes the Phendrana Drifts, a cold, mountainous region holding Chozo ruins and Glacial One, a Pirate laboratory used to study Metroids. In the Phazon Mines, Samus sees the result of the Phazon experiments, including the Metroid Prime, a creature that arrived with the meteor. She fights Phazon-enhanced Pirates and wins the Phazon Suit by defeating the monstrous Omega Pirate.

  The Chozo built the Artifact Temple to contain the Metroid Prime and stop Phazon from covering the planet. Samus brings the twelve artifacts back, and Meta Ridley attacks her there. After beating him, she enters the Impact Crater and defeats the Metroid Prime. It absorbs her Phazon Suit and explodes, and she flees the collapsing crater in her ship. Players who finish with every item collected see one more scene. The Metroid Prime rebuilds itself into a body resembling Samus.

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• 6. Sound of Tallon IV

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  Kenji Yamamoto composed the music, assisted by Kouichi Kyuma. He wanted to please longtime fans, so the soundtrack arranges tracks from earlier games. The first Tallon Overworld theme reinterprets the Brinstar theme from Metroid. The Magmoor Caverns music is a new version of the Lower Norfair tune from Super Metroid. The Meta Ridley fight uses a fast-paced reimagining of the Ridley boss music, which debuted in Super Metroid and has returned in most Metroid games since.

  The score might have sounded very different. Early in development, Retro Studios asked the English electronic duo Autechre to compose the soundtrack, but Nintendo halted the plan. Tommy Tallarico Studios first supplied sound effects. Miyamoto judged them not good enough for an extended presentation at Space World 2001. The finished game supports Dolby Pro Logic II setups and can be played in surround sound. Scitron published a soundtrack album, Metroid Prime & Fusion Original Soundtracks, on the 18th of June 2003.

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• 7. Critical Verdict

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  Metroid Prime reached North America on the 18th of November 2002. Japan followed on the 28th of February 2003 and Europe on the 21st of March 2003. In its first week it sold 250,000 units. It was the second-best-selling game of that November in North America, behind Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. By July 2006 it had sold more than 1.49 million copies in the United States alone and earned over US$50 million. It sold more than 78,000 copies in Japan and was the eighth-bestselling GameCube game in Australia. Nintendo added it to its Player's Choice line in the PAL region. Worldwide sales reached 2.84 million, making it the top-selling Metroid game until Metroid Dread in 2021.

  Metacritic reports "universal acclaim". The three reviewers at Electronic Gaming Monthly each gave it 10/10. Critics praised the detailed graphics, the varied environments, the moody soundtrack and the immersive atmosphere. They also liked its exploration-centered design, which stood apart from action games such as Halo while staying faithful to the Metroid formula. Not everyone agreed on the controls. Game Informer thought the control scheme awkward. Entertainment Weekly likened the game to a "1990s arcade game" with "a pretty weak plot". GamePro warned that inexperienced players "might find it exhausting to keep revisiting the same old places over and over and over". In 2004, the countdown show Filter named it the game with the best graphics of all time.

  At the 6th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gave it "Console First-Person Action Game of the Year". It was also nominated for "Game of the Year" and "Outstanding Innovation in Console Gaming", among other categories, and it led the ceremony with the most nominations.

  In later rankings, IGN placed it 23rd in its Top 100. Official Nintendo Magazine put it 18th in 2009, and Nintendo Power ranked it 10th in its "Top 200 Nintendo Games Ever" and sixth best of the 2000s. IGN named it the best GameCube game, while GameSpy placed it third behind The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Resident Evil 4. Wired ranked it 10th among "The 15 Most Influential Games of the Decade". Its writer credited the game with "breaking the genre free from the clutches of Doom".

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Metroid Prime Pinball arrived on the Nintendo DS in 2005. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes followed on the GameCube in 2004, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption came to the Wii in 2007. The action spin-off Metroid Prime Hunters reached the DS in 2006, and Metroid Prime: Federation Force reached the Nintendo 3DS in 2016. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond launched in 2025 for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

  In 2009, the original game returned on the Wii. Japan received it in the New Play Control! series, with controls built around the Wii Remote's pointer, bonus content and screenshot-taking. Other regions got it inside the compilation Metroid Prime: Trilogy, which reached the Wii U eShop in January 2015.

  The Frigate Orpheon is a playable stage in the Super Smash Bros series, with the Parasite Queen in the background and music from Metroid Prime. The game's gameplay and heads-up display also shaped first-person shooters such as Geist and Star Wars: Republic Commando. Speedrunning communities formed around it to share their runs.

  Fans have kept reworking it. Primehack, an unofficial branch of the Dolphin emulator, appeared in 2019 with new high-resolution textures, 4K support, improved lighting and keyboard and mouse controls. It reached the Steam Deck in 2022 through Emudeck. A demo of a 2D fangame version came out in April 2021. A cease and desist from Nintendo ended its development by that August.

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