Former Retro dev talks about Metroid Prime 2 & 3 struggles, and the cancelled Project X

A behind-the-scenes look

25 June 2022
by rawmeatcowboy 4
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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
[GameXplain, KIWI Talkz]

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Comments (4)

noxide

2M ago

Very 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

2M ago

Considering 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

2M ago

You 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

2M ago

Love these interviews with Retro. Always a great insight into the dev process of some of my favorite games (and Metroid Prime 3).