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In the face of bright and lighthearted Nintendo classics, Gunpei Yokoi set out to make a dark, moody, and ultimately groundbreaking action game that culminated in Super Metroid. Watch on to find out Metroid’s origins!

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Animated by Steve Dorian:
https://www.youtube.com/user/mmmLemonyFreshFilms

Voiced by Octopimp:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MasterYorgi


Transcript:

In the early 1980’s Nintendo released a string of successful platforming games including Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. They also found success with the critically acclaimed adventure game The Legend of Zelda. The brain trust at Nintendo Research and Development 1 and Intelligent Systems decided to combine elements of both game types to create a new kind of action game.

Originally titled Space Hunter, game directors Satoru Okada and Yoshio Sakamoto and producer Gunpei Yokoi wanted to push the video game boundaries and decided to make a game that would feature a non-linear progression and solitary exploration, but most importantly, a female lead.

Some time into the development process, one of the developers asked the others, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?" Everyone agreed and Samus Aran became the first female protagonist in a home console video game series.

Then, taking world and character cues from Ridley Scott’s Alien and its creature designer H.R. Giger, the game was retitled Metroid, a combination of metro and android.

The game was released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System peripheral in August 1986, and in North America for the NES one year later to critical and commercial success, setting itself up for the 1991 sequel, Metroid II: Return of Samus.

While it didn’t enjoy the same reception as its predecessor, the game was very popular in North America, and after pitching for half a year, Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto was finally given the greenlight to create another sequel for the SNES.

Nintendo was still dubious, and over the course of the game’s two year development, producer Gunpei Yokoi cut the game’s budget and almost canceled it at least three times.

Thankfully, he didn’t. Widely considered one of the best video games ever, Super Metroid was released in 1994, smartly building on the world-view and story from the previous two games and setting the franchise up for massive success for years to come.

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