Metroid Prime Hunters - Development

Development

The development team for Metroid Prime Hunters at Nintendo Software Technology (NST) was led by the game's director, Masamichi Abe and the lead technical engineer, Colin Reed, who had both previously worked together on several games, including the Nintendo games Pikmin and 1080° Snowboarding. The team for Hunters was composed of thirty people, which Abe noted was larger than the development team of most other Nintendo DS games. Kensuke Tanabe of Nintendo Company, Limited (NCL) in Japan came up with the original idea for the game. Retro Studios, which developed previous Metroid Prime games, was unable to develop Metroid Prime Hunters because it was already working on a game. Therefore, Tanabe contacted NST with the idea, and let them develop it instead. NST developed the game instead of NCL because Nintendo wanted the division to influence Metroid Prime Hunters with western ideals, styles, and presentation.

While developing the game, most of NST's efforts were focused on its multiplayer aspect because of its first-person shooter gameplay, and to take advantage of the Wi-Fi and voice chat capabilities of the Nintendo DS. One of the game's designers, Richard Vorodi, noted that "the hardware kinda dictated ." Wanting to introduce a new element to the Metroid series, Abe created several new bounty hunters after he realized that the game's multiplayer mode and the new bounty hunters could both be implemented seamlessly into the game: "We had this idea early on and thought that would be a good way to introduce and to the gameplay and take advantage of that in the multiplayer." Metroid Prime Hunters includes several references to previous games in the Metroid Prime series. Samus' ship is from the original Metroid Prime, and her suit is the same one that appears in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The developers decided to add them because they wanted to show that the technology has evolved, and they also wanted to include something that was instantly recognizable to those who had played previous games in the series.

Metroid Prime Hunters was first revealed at the E3 convention in 2004, with IGN gave the game their Best Nintendo DS Game of E3 award. An early demo, titled Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, was included as a pack-in game with the Nintendo DS when it launched in 2004. Only a single-player game, it consisted of training scenarios with no specific plot. After the demo was released, the game's controls shifted from a control stick method to stylus aiming. When Nintendo received negative feedback at E3 2005 about the game's lack of an online feature, the company announced in August 2005 that the game's release would be delayed to give the developers time to implement Nintendo WFC support.

After the game's release was delayed to give NST time to implement the multiplayer feature, the developers took the time to make more changes. They worked on the game's framerate to make the graphics move more smoothly. The game's visuals were improved; a developer added reflections to the Morph Ball. The other developers admired the effect, and added it to other parts of the game. NST collaborated with Retro Studios, the company behind several Metroid games, to design the game's art and characters to make sure that they fit into the overall Metroid series. When asked why Metroid Prime Hunters was placed between Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes chronologically, Reed noted that the game was not influenced by the story of either game, so there were no continuity issues. He described Hunters as a side story to the Metroid Prime series.