Ex Retro Studios dev shares insight into Metroid Prime's creation, bugs, and more

In honor of the 20th anniversary of Metroid Prime, the KIWI TALKZ podcast had a chat with former Retro Studios Lead Technical Engineer Jack Mathews to get some insight into the game’s creation. You can find a smattering of details from the discussion below.

• Chozo Ruins was the first area built for the game
• the Beetle A.I. system was one of the first made, which is also in the Chozo Ruins
• the Speed Booster wasn’t considered for Prime games due to motion sickness
• the lag on Samus’ visor caused some motion sickness, which had to be tweaked
• Metroid Prime went through extensive crunch
• the elevator glitch was Mathews fault, a glitch that causes the game to crash
• the elevator glitch can occur when taking the first elevator to Chozo Ruins
• Nintendo was aware of the glitch before the first disc pressing, but thought it stemmed from a PC hard drive issue and not the GameCube, which is why they went ahead with pressing
• it took Mathews a month to figure out how to fix this elevator glitch
• Nintendo was worried Metroid Prime would be too short
• Chozo Artifact quests were added late in development to address game length concerns