The road to corruption: Retro Studios and the making of Metroid Prime
As gamers, our focus is often on playing games and not the subtleties that go on behind the scenes. If we only knew about all those details, though, we might be shocked to find out how something like the Metroid Prime series almost never came to be.
Retro Studios president and CEO Michael Kelbaugh recently talked about the Prime arc at the 2007 Montreal Games Summit. In the conference, he explained the pressures of having his (at that time) rookie studio pick up such an important franchise, and how Miyamoto was influential in taking the series from third person to first person.
Fans of the series, however, will know that Metroid Prime isn't strictly a first-person shooter. In fact, there are certain times when the player is taken to third person, like when Samus uses her morph ball powers. Retro Studios game director Mark Pacini recalled, "Miyamoto's first directive was if we don't make the transition between the ball and first-person seamless, then we can't do this game." If the team hadn't been able to do this, then Miyamoto would have never green-lighted the project.
When the first game was completed and became a success, the studio began working on their second project. So, what did they learn from MP2: Echoes? "The game was too damn hard. And gamers got lost too easily, too."
Finally, with Metroid Prime: Corruption, the biggest challenge was the integration of the Wiimote. It took a year for the studio to get the controls right, and game had to be pushed back from a launch release in order to refine them. The studio also decided not to include a multiplayer mode so that the developers could put their focus in perfecting the single-player experience.
Now that the trilogy has come to an end, though, one has to wonder: what's next for Metroid?
