Metroid is
Nintendo’s black sheep. While the series has seen just as much critical acclaim
as the Japanese gaming giant’s other flagship franchises, Metroid has never been the commercial juggernaut Mario and Zelda are year after year. So when faced with the technological
leap from two dimensions to three-dimensional graphics, why did Nintendo for
the first time in their history hand over one of its own series to a Western
developer? Metroid Prime is the
culmination of the company’s marriage of East and West in game design. The
unlikely bedfellows of Nintendo and U.S. developer Retro Studios managed to
create one of the most successful video games of all time, both critically and
commercially.
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| Gunpei Yokoi with his Game Boy |
The series has had Western roots from the beginning. It was
conceived by misunderstood designer Gunpei Yokoi—most famous as creator of Game
Boy and for ruining his career later with the infamous Virtual Boy. Yokoi took
heavy influence from Ridley Scott’s 1979 science-fiction horror opus Alien and the art of Swiss surrealist
H.R. Giger. Even before Prime, Metroid was Nintendo’s only franchise
directed at an older demographic with a more serious tone, and their only
series with better sales numbers in the West than domestically in Japan.
When Metroid was
finally handed to a Western developer for the jump to 3D, it wasn’t what you’d
call a “smooth transition.” Austin, Texas-based Retro Studios was inexperienced
and in shambles with an absent CEO when Nintendo came knocking. And their final
product was a first-person game—perhaps the visual perspective most emblematic
of Western design. How was this game not a total flop? And how did it
consolidate the vast differences between Eastern and Western approaches to
video games?
