Former Retro dev talks about Metroid Prime 2 & 3 struggles, and the cancelled Project X
A behind-the-scenes look
The Kiwi Talkz podcast is back once again with another heaping helping of Metroid talk, this time coming from former Retro dev, Paul Tozour. Tozour talked about Metroid Prime 2 and 3, along with the cancelled Project X. You can see the finer points of the interview below.
- nearly every boss battle Retro completed and sent to Nintendo would get changed
- the final battle with Dark Samus at the end of Metroid Prime 2 was remade twice
- Tanabe originally wanted dozens of dark Samus’ flying around, but that caused a performance issue
- Retro would show Nintendo what they were working on, and Nintendo would request major changes
- a number of Retro devs were Halo fans, which led to it influencing Metroid Prime 3
- these devs would butt heads with Tanabe, as he didn’t care about Halo
- the first Metroid Prime 2 boss battle with Dark Samus was Retro’s attempt to make a boss encounter similar typical to a Western first-person shooter
- Project X was meant to show Nintendo that they didn’t need Nintendo’s oversight, but Retro eventually cancelled this project
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noxide
9M agoVery interesting. I can tell the devs at Retro for that period were head strong and had a vision. Those are great qualities to have for team leads but having too many of them in a project will no doubt cause some head butting. This is probably why a lot of them went off to work on their own projects.
marl0
9M agoConsidering how great these games were, it's difficult to say if this is a good thing or not. I'm sure it must have been frustrating, but it's hard to argue with the results.
ridleysaria
9M agoYou can definitely see the Halo influences in Prime 3. I’m not crazy about that. I don’t like Halo, I like Metroid. But I guess it turned out ok, certainly better than whatever the hell inspired Other M.
stil
9M agoLove these interviews with Retro. Always a great insight into the dev process of some of my favorite games (and Metroid Prime 3).
tbh, people should be more aware the Prime games are a collaboration between Western and Japanese teams, rather than only give the credit to Retro Studios like i've seen people do, Metroid Prime as it is couldn't have been created by Retro if not for Nintendo's guidance, including Miyamoto and Tanabe, and the same goes for Nintendo they alone couldn't make Metroid Prime what it is. Its a fusion of different philosophies and that's what makes it wonderful.
So i have no doubt Nintendo helped a lot in shaping the project, just like they did with MercurySteam and i believe it was for the best even if they naturally had a few differences and head butting, the results speak for themselves
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