Development of Metroid Prime

This article is written from the Real Life point of view

The development of Metroid Prime lasted two and a half to three years from its inception, from 1999-2002. It is a first-person adventure for Nintendo GameCube, developed by Retro Studios, who later ported the game to Wii, as a separate re-release in Japan and as part of Metroid Prime Trilogy internationally. It was released in North America on November 18, 2002 to universal acclaim and critical success, becoming the best selling Metroid game until it was surpassed by Metroid Dread over 20 years later.

Background

After the release of Super Metroid in 1994, Metroid fans eagerly awaited a sequel, although it would be eight years before one was created. An installment for the Nintendo 64 was discussed by Nintendo in public, but it never entered production. Developer Shigeru Miyamoto explained that it was because Nintendo "couldn't come out with any concrete ideas". Later, Yoshio Sakamoto said Nintendo had approached a company (which he declined to name) about creating a 3D Metroid game on the console. They declined in part because they felt they could not develop a game equal to Super Metroid.

Development

1998-1999

Metroid Prime was developed as a collaboration between Retro Studios and important Nintendo EAD and R&D1 members. Retro Studios was created in 1998, through an alliance between Nintendo and former Iguana Entertainment founder Jeff Spangenberg. After establishing its offices in Austin, Texas in 1999, Retro received five game ideas for the future GameCube, despite not even having development kits yet. These games included Metaforce, Car Combat/Thunder Rally, Raven Blade and NFL Retro Football.

2000-2001

Screenshot from an early trailer for Prime.

In 2000, Shigeru Miyamoto visited Retro Studios and noted the similarity of Metaforce to Metroid. Therefore, he recommended that they turn it into a Metroid game. Led to believe that the GameCube was more powerful than it was, Retro planned a traditional first-person shooter control system for Prime with right stick moving and left stick aiming. For more information on this, see the Metaforce article.

Nintendo producers, such as Miyamoto, Kensuke Tanabe and Kenji Miki, as well as Metroid series producer Yoshio Sakamoto, communicated with the Texas-based studio through emails, monthly phone conferences and personal gatherings. The game, like Metaforce, was developed with a third-person perspective for the first three months, but this was changed to a first-person perspective after Miyamoto intervened, causing much of what was already developed to be scrapped, including a vertical platforming section. Among the reasons for leaving the third-person perspective were Rare's trouble with the camera in Jet Force Gemini, shooting in third-person "not being very intuitive", and exploration being easier using first-person. Despite this, Sakamoto and Spangenberg preferred to keep it in third-person. The conflict over perspectives led to the resignation of the lead developer, John Whitmore (he later came to agree with Miyamoto's decision). At one point, Prime switched back to being a third-person game, before finally settling on first-person. Retro staff still chose to add in third-person moments, such as when the Morph Ball is in use or Samus uses a Save Station..

Metaforce, Car Combat and NFL Retro Football were canceled to establish focus on Prime, which made its first public appearance in the form of a ten second video at Space World 2000. In November of the same year, Retro Studios confirmed in the "job application" part of its website its involvement with the game, and at E3 2001, Prime was officially announced by Nintendo, receiving mixed reactions due to the change from 2D side scrolling to 3D first-person. By July 2001, there was an unproven report that the development of Prime and Raven Blade was troubled by engine problems, low morale and uninspired gameplay. Raven Blade was canceled in 2001, ensuring that Prime was the only game in development.

2001-2002

Director Mark Pacini said Retro tried to make the game so that the only difficult parts would be boss battles, so players would not be "afraid to explore", because "the challenge of the game was finding your way around". Individual boss battles took two to three months to be developed.

Platforming in first-person went through multiple iterations before the team found a version that worked. The camera system was created by Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, who collaborated with Mark Pacini and Karl Deckard on making it function with platforming. At first, platforms had "lock points" where Samus could lock onto the middle of the platform, jump, and automatically land on it. This gave way to a subtle nudge of the camera at the apex of Samus's jumping.

According to Michael Mann, the game's development lasted roughly two and a half years, and had a team of 35 people according to Mike Wikan. Retro and Nintendo EAD collaborated on the production process, exchanging hundreds of emails, as well as telephone and video conferences, with occasional staff visits from both companies to Texas and Japan. EAD provided multicolor Excel spreadsheets with navigation cells to Retro, which outlined their vision of Prime.

Rooms in Prime were built as prototypes ("blue rooms" as they were created in blue grids) by the designers, who would add the gameplay elements before they were given to the art team. Their responsibility was then to add the appearance of the rooms while maintaining their gameplay functions. Doors were implemented as hidden loading screens, causing a compressed copy of the next room to load when opened. Retro staff licensed an open source decompression library (possibly LZO) to ensure easier loading of rooms, fixing memory fragmentation issues and allowing the rooms to be made larger without sacrificing performance.

75-80% of the game's content was added in the final six months of development, once the foundations for it had been set. Employees worked six-seven days a week, twelve hours per day in the final stretch. Late into development, Miyamoto re-mapped the GameCube controller's buttons by himself, improving the control scheme. Near the end of production, friends of developers would playtest the game with their progress monitored, and the staff would make improvements based on their feedback.

Prime went gold in the middle of October 2002. Shortly after its release, Retro was informed by Nintendo that a bad batch of GameCube CPUs had been shipped, but the only game that failed to run correctly on them was Prime. The code ran too fast for the CPUs to handle and had to be slowed down. However, Retro was only given one dev kit with the defective CPU, and it had to be cold before they could test the problem. Therefore, it was frozen, with tests occurring in 15 minute increments before it was re-frozen, and the process was repeated.

Audio

Kenji Yamamoto, assisted by Kouichi Kyuma, composed the music for Prime. The soundtrack contains remixes of tracks from previous games in the series, because Yamamoto wanted "to satisfy old Metroid fans. It's like a present for them." The initial Tallon Overworld theme is an arrangement of Metroid's Brinstar theme, the music in Magmoor Caverns is a remix of that of Super Metroid's Lower Norfair area, and the music during the fight with Meta Ridley is a remix of the Ridley boss music first featured in Super Metroid, which has been remixed and featured in most Metroid games since.

According to Clark Wen, the lead audio designer for the first two Prime games, the game was "designed originally to be played without music." He later clarified that this was never an official direction from the team, but a worst case scenario since it took a long time to find a composer for the game; Yamamoto did not step up until later in development. Tommy Tallarico and Joey Kuras from Tommy Tallarico Studios were aided in creating the firsts sound effects at the start of development.

Wen was inspired to continue the "lineage" of sound design from Metroid and Super Metroid in Metroid Prime. Wen was influenced by the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, where the sound made by the helicopter blades was synthesized. This sound had an "otherworldly" feel to Wen and he was inspired to use the same technique to create realistic sounds with synthesis in Prime. This approach was also used in Japanese television series and tokusatsu that Wen had watched, where sound effects would be more stylized compared to American television. He sought to pay homage to classic video game sounds rather than using Hollywood quality audio and music as other studios were at the time. The synthesizers Wen used included Absynth, MetaSynth and Access Virus.

The game's soundtrack was nearly composed by the English electronic music duo Autechre, which consists of Sean Booth and Rob Brown. Both of them are credited under Special Thanks in the original North American version of Prime. In a 2013 AMA interview, Booth said that he signed a non-disclosure agreement and could not discuss his exact involvement with the game. Wen later explained that Retro Studios had approached Autechre to compose for Prime, and used some of their work in demo levels, but Nintendo rejected them. Retro sent Nintendo a list of composers they wanted to approach, including Vert, none of which were approved. In a 2022 AMA stream, Booth confirmed Autechre's near involvement for the first time.

Joseph Toscano submitted a musical demo that remixed the Title theme to Retro Studios, but he was ultimately passed over by Nintendo. After six months, Nintendo offered Yamamoto to Retro, who immediately accepted. All of the music he composed was well liked by the team, with only minor adjustments needing to be made. Yamamoto was particular about the use of Prime's music, and gave Retro a spreadsheet with every single music cue he wanted and when they would play. Some scenes would have multiple music cues. Andrew McKenzie of Hafler Trio is also credited under Special Thanks, suggesting he was among the musicians considered.

The night before Prime went gold, Yamamoto requested that Wen make about a dozen last minute changes, which he worked on until the early hours of the morning. Wen felt it was the right decision in the end.