Mark Pacini

This article is written from the Real Life point of view

Pacini with Keiji Inafune.

Mark Pacini was the lead designer on the Metroid Prime series.

Metroid Prime series

A notable creation of his in the game is the Parasite Queen.

Metroid Official Site banner.

Pacini took part in an interview on the Japanese Metroid Official Site along with Karl Deckard and Michael Mann. It was published on April 16, 2003, and unofficially translated into English by Shinesparkers on February 26, 2021. He commented that it was difficult to make the Screw Attack work in first-person, although it was later implemented into Echoes and Corruption. He also stated his belief that the essence of Metroid consisted of three components: a science fiction atmosphere, exploration (which he felt translated well to the first-person perspective), and Samus Aran as a character the player could identify with. Asked what a Japanese player might enjoy most about Prime, Pacini suggested they would enjoy the Visor system and Morph Ball. On a then potential sequel to Prime, Pacini said there were discussions about it.

When development began on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Pacini had ambitious ideas for an open world, non-linear experience, which made greater use of the Gunship. However, hardware limitations meant that these ideas had to be scaled back for the final game. Pacini created a 10 inch cardboard origami model of the Gunship to use as a visual aid when presenting his concept to employees, which became something of a mascot for production. Pacini took increasingly more ownership of the boss battles in Corruption, including rejecting a version of the final battle with Dark Samus.

Pacini was the design lead of Project X, an ultimately cancelled game in development at Retro set in The Legend of Zelda series.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption comments

Transcribed from an interview given to Yahoo! Games in 2007. The video can be viewed here.

“	I think the way I'd describe Metroid Prime 3 to someone who's never heard it or seen it before is it's a first-person adventure. It's played from your perspective, through you, through the eyes of the character, and it's an adventure game. There are shooting elements to it, but mainly it's about discovery of your environment, finding new abilities, and traveling to different worlds, and generally about exploration. We always knew it was going to be for the Wii, but we started development on the game before we actually had the hardware. So we started with the core ideas for the game, knowing that these were the basic ideas and the basic structure that we wanted to have for the next Metroid Prime game, but we did not receive the information about the Wii controller until we were well into development, until we were almost 9 months into development. And then we got a big surprise of, 'Hey, this is what we're going to do for the next console.' So many things had to be refactored, and many things fell right into place. The Wii Remote in respect to MP3 offers us the ability to do things better than we hadn't previously done in other games. The Metroid Prime franchise is mainly about exploration and not necessarily about shooting. While we still have that focus in the Metroid Prime 3 game, we were able to concentrate on combat a little bit more, make it more compelling, make it a little bit faster, allow the player to move better in the environment so that now, not only was it an interesting adventure game, but we also were able to add that combat component to it that maybe we had to slow down in the previous games because of the control scheme. We spent a great deal of time and research on how the controls should work and what people do when they actually play these games, and I think that all too often with the initial games on the Wii, the thought was let's do as many interesting things as we can with the controller even though they might not have a direct connection to what the player is doing, and that often comes off as feeling kind of contrived, or 'man, the Wii controller doesn't work that well.' But what we tried to do with Metroid Prime 3, and hopefully we as the developers will continue to do and other developers, is think of things and develop ideas and mechanics that make the player feel that there's a relationship between what I'm doing in my hand and what's being related on-screen. I think that was the number one lesson we learned, and I think other developers are going to learn as well as they continue to work with the Wii. As far as pushing the limits of the Wii, we were able to definitely add things that we weren't able to do before, like bloom lighting, larger textures, more polygons, bigger vistas, more characters on-screen. So as far as if we pushed the Wii as far as it can go right now, it's our first game with this new hardware, so it's hard to tell at this point, but I think we've pushed it pretty hard. We are taking a break from the Metroid series and from Samus, so I'm sure that there will be other titles created, but as far as the Retro Studios is concerned, we're taking a break for a little bit.	„

After Prime

In 2008, Pacini left Retro Studios, along with Todd Keller and Jack Mathews, to form the independent Armature Studio. Pacini has stated that he chose to separate from Retro because he felt limited by Nintendo's influence, but that he was still on good terms with Nintendo and Retro. Bryan Walker described their departures as "jarring" to the team still at Retro Studios.

Pacini has admitted that he is unable to enjoy the Prime series, due to the depth of his involvement with their creation - he was only able to see the mistakes made in development when playing them, and as such he avoided playing them after they were released. Commenting on this in 2018, Mathews said that he understood - but did not share - his sentiment, and said that "he's an eternal pessimist", but that he is also a "great creator" who sees the faults in his work and always strives to make his next game even better.

As of 2021, Pacini is no longer interested in discussing Metroid Prime in interviews.

Trivia

• In the beta version of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, LCDR T. Huxley's name was M. Pacini appeared, in reference to Mark Pacini.
• Clark Wen commented on the 6MB audio limit of the Nintendo GameCube that "Getting everything to fit was a real challenge and led to a lot of harried late-night visits to Mark Pacini's office when the designers would decide to throw in a new creature in a level."
• According to Kynan Pearson, Pacini and Mark Haigh-Hutchinson worked heavily on the Wii Remote aiming and gameplay mechanics for Corruption, and he enjoyed brainstorming ideas with the two of them.
• Pacini consulted Bryan Walker on the design of the GFMC encampments in Echoes and Corruption. They were also sitting in a break room together at E3 2004 when Satoru Iwata entered and personally thanked them for their hard work on the Echoes demo.
• Walker said that Pacini and Haigh-Hutchinson were "organic leaders" that served as a "cultural pathway" to the improved development values during production of Echoes.

Gallery

An interview with Pacini in issue 187 of Electronic Gaming Monthly.