The Metroid franchise is obviously one of the most cherished franchises in gaming, both from the perspective of hardcore Nintendo fans and the media alike, with Super Metroid even topping “greatest of all time” charts in both online and print media. Though even with all its many accolades, the Metroid franchises is also one of the biggest tough luck cases in gaming both past and present, proving the old adage of almost always being in the right place and the wrong time. Though acclaimed by many, the franchise has rarely managed to achieve mass-market success, even when it goes above and beyond anything the competition can muster. Part of this can be blamed on circumstance, and part can be blamed on the franchise’s publisher Nintendo, but either way, Metroid has suffered through everything from overshadowed launches and near extinction all while bringing us some of the most cherished moments in all of gaming. Let’s take a detailed look back in time at the birth and evolution of this amazing series that has done everything from rewrite the book on open-ended platformer design, to establish a new identity for strong female stars in a leading role.



An Unlikely Hero

Throughout the 1980’s Nintendo’s rise to power was much reminiscent of the Wii’s current level of world domination. Nintendo was a company well known for making games that appealed to the whole family. Sure, you had the more violent and gritty action games like Contra, and Ninja Gaiden, but all of that came from third parties. Nintendo themselves were not known for making anything counterproductive to family oriented gaming. Even Super Mario Bros. with its crude graphics wasn’t meant to be a cute game in concept, but that’s what it became in time due to its global marketing and the sequels reflected that. EAD made the cute and beloved adventures that catered to all age groups, but as far as Nintendo’s internal teams were concerned, there was little for the older crowd. Where were the dark and brooding sci-fi epics filled with thrills and kills, and who would provide them?

Though they are now collectively known as Intelligent Systems (after the closure and merging of R&D1 in 2004), Nintendo’s original Research and Development Team founded by Gunpei Yokoi appropriately went under the name R&D1. For many years before, during, and after the arrival of their famous intern Shigeru Miyamoto and the forming of his EAD team, R&D1 toiled about creating a bunch of random hits that would many years later be fondly remembered as early pieces of Nintendo lore. They made everything from the obscure Sheriff and Kung-Fu, to the more recognizable Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Mach Rider, and Ice Climber alongside many others. They were master craftsmen of one-hit wonders, yet they had no legacy characters that a series of games could be formed around. After the overnight success of Miyamoto’s Mario series, R&D1’s desire to match that success fueled an unofficial in-house competition between the teams. It was their desire to gain the same level of long-desired admiration and approval from their president and owner Heroshi Yamauchi that Shigeru Miyamoto had achieved seemingly overnight.

They needed the one thing he had…bankable franchises. They looked around for inspiration. Mario had shown how well a platformer could work on an 8-bit console, but Mario suffered from directional inhibition (you couldn't travel left). What if you not only expanded the directions a character could travel in an 8-bit platformer, but also expanded the scope of the quest beyond levels and high score? What if you transformed something as simple as an 8-bit platformer into a fully fledged adventure? R&D1 wondered, but they would need one visionary to bring the idea to fruition.



In 1982, a man named Yoshio Sakamoto joined the ranks of Nintendo game designers. He was recruited by Shigeru Miyamoto to work as a level designer on Donkey Kong Jr. Not long after completing the project, he moved to R&D1 under the assurance of Gunpei Yokoi that he would be given the opportunity to direct a game. After finding success with the direction of R&D1’s Balloon Fight, he would be involved with two other games, one of which he would again direct. He would serve as an assistant director on Kid Icarus, while also serving the role of lead director of a little project known as Metroid.

Yoshio had a specific mindset when going into both projects. He didn’t necessarily want to compete with Miyamoto’s team. He just wanted to (in his own words)“always come up with something very different from what Mr. Miyamoto is likely to do”. That’s why the game took the sci-fi tone. Miyamoto’s games were cute and welcoming. He wanted Metroid to be dark and foregoing to set it apart. Metroid was a rare beast when it came to atmosphere. Even with the limitations of 8-bit, director Yoshio Sakamoto, Character artist Hiroji Kiyotake, planner and concept originator Makoto Kanoh, and producer Gunpei Yokoi managed to create a believable world filled with disgusting parasitic creatures, brooding locations, not to mention tense moments of fear and panic all while giving the player incentive to explorer deeper into the planet by powering them up little by little, thus raising their confidence level and pushing them further. Non-linier design wasn’t common in games of the era, if not downright unheard of.

People often credit The Legend of Zelda as the originator of non-linier exploration on consoles because it was the more successful of the two, but the fact is that both Miyamoto’s Zelda and Sakamoto’s Metroid originated and had been in development at the same time, and were even released in North America on the very same day (August 22, 1987). The Famicom Disk System with its rewritable floppy media wasn’t available in North America, and both Metroid and The Legend of Zelda utilized the Famicom Disk System’s rewritable floppies to save player’s progress in the original Japanese versions. Both games were released in North America on the same day, yet only Zelda came with the battery backed memory. Nintendo had chosen not to use the (then) expensive battery save technology in Metroid’s cartridge, and had originally planned not to release the title in North America at all due to low sales in Japan. To save the game, R&D1 modified Metroid to adopt the modern password system as a functional, yet cumbersome alternative for saving of progress, so the game was released alongside Zelda. This was the earliest showing of Nintendo’s longstanding disbelief in the series’ potential, a corporate predisposition which would linger until 2001.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has revealed some about the newly-written back story of the character’s origins, yet there was no such story in existence when R&D1 created the character. Mother Brain’s name was actually something of a company in-joke. Mother Brain was actually a nickname for their supreme lord and Commander Heroshi Yamauchi. People around the office had a tendency of calling him “The Mother Brain” behind his back, so this company in-joke resulted in the naming of Metroid’s iconic villain that players would be later blowing into chunks.



It can’t be stated what an achievement it was in the 1980’s to create such an atmospheric masterpiece—a game that used the same graphics engine as Kid Icarus to save development resources. 16 colors, tiny sprites, two action buttons, and sprite flicker don’t exactly work to the advantage of the artist, yet in the hands of talented people with a lot of imagination, there is little that can’t be accomplished.

Another vital element was the hypnotic soundtrack from one of Nintendo’s most overlooked composers: Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka. Having started as a humble sound effects programmer for Donkey Kong, he went on to become one of the most versatile composers of the 8-bit era. Among his countless work are such classics as: Metroid, Kid Icarus, Super Mario Land, Earthbound, Punch Out, Pokemon (Red & Blue), Ice Climbers, Balloon Fight, Dr. Mario, Super Smash Bros., and even the famous sounds of Tetris for Game Boy and NES as well as a couple dozen others.