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Over the weekend, we shared a new feature from Did You Know Gaming that went over the history of the Metroid Prime franchise. That video included a bunch of details about Metroid Prime that you might not know, and we’ve collected a handful of the juicer details below.

One of the more startling revelations came from Retro and Nintendo’s understanding of what a bounty hunter was. For Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Retro was thinking of giving Samus various side-missions that would earn her upgrades. Retro knew that Nintendo wouldn’t want Samus going out on actual bounty hunts to get money, so they thought this approach was a nice way to meet in the middle. Nintendo saw things very differently.

According to Bryan Walker, senior producer on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Nintendo saw Samus as an altruistic character, and even called her ‘motherly.’ Samus took on her missions out of the goodness of her heart, and not for some sort of monetary/ability-enhancing motivations. This led to Retro and Nintendo discussing bounty hunters in general, and Retro came to learn that Nintendo simply didn’t understand what a bounty hunter was. Nintendo thought the term was more in line with ‘space adventurer’ rather than someone who hunts down targets for rewards. With that explanation, Retro could see why Nintendo was against their original side-mission idea for Corruption!

That wasn’t the only surprising bit of information shared by Did You Know Gaming about the Metroid Prime series, either. We came to learn that the very early beginnings of Metroid Prime came from another game that Retro was working on, but Nintendo wasn’t too keen on some of the ideas.

Metroid Prime can find its roots in MetaForce, a third person game starring three female meta-humans. This game took you through chapters focused on each meta-human, complete with their own enemies to fight. The story actually incorporated elements of gene-editing in order to create the perfect human, cult leaders, and a Neo-Nazi eugenicist.

Believe it or not, Nintendo liked the concept of the game, but they weren’t too sure about having three main characters or the third-person perspective. As you know, MetaForce never saw release, and that’s because the project eventually morphed into Metroid Prime. Obviously the story was pretty much completely overhauled, but some slight elements of MetaForce do live on in Samus’ first 3D adventure.

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Comments (4)

kuribo

2y ago

I watched that DYKG episode and it was all very interesting. The DYKG team interviewed a few former Retro folks.


the_crimson_lure

2y ago

This just in, Nintendo finally found out today what a plumber actually is!


stil

2y ago

I feel like Walker's been telling that story about Nintendo's weird conception of bounty hunting since *forever*. I still remember in that "A Space Bounty Hunter in Texas" IGN article from over a decade ago where he was talking about how the team joked that Samus was a "pro-bono bounty hunter".

(In actuality, she's more of a private investigator who pretty much just takes jobs from the Federation, but 'Bounty hunter' is catchier than 'Independent contractor who almost exclusively works for the cops'.)


giancarlo thomaz senoni

2y ago

didnt Adam point up in the intro of Metroid Dread, the reward for completing the mission of ZRD outweigh the reward?