Ex-Retro staff reflect on the development crunch for Metroid Prime

Both the gaming press and gamers in general have become a lot more cognizant of how bad crunch has been in the game industry. There are countless stories of big-name games that made it out the door due to ungodly hours of crunch from the dev team. Unfortunately, Metroid Prime is infamous for being one of the worst cases.

In a new video snippet, we get to hear numerous Ex-Retro staff discuss the crunch that took place during Metroid Prime. In particular, Mike Wikan (Senior Designer), Zoid Kirsch (Senior Engineer), Jack Mathews (Lead Technical Engineer) and Clark Wen(Audio Lead) all look back on how rough some portions of development were.

Now that dev crunch is a major talking point, it seems many studios have moved away from this approach as much as possible. It certainly still exists though, and I think we can all agree we’d rather games slip a few months than have developers pushing 90+ hours a week to make a launch date.