Metroid (video Game) - Development

Development

After Nintendo's release of commercially successful platforming games in the 1980s, including Donkey Kong (1981), Ice Climber (1985), and Super Mario Bros. (1985), as well as the critically acclaimed adventure game The Legend of Zelda (1986), the company began work on an action game. The game was dubbed Metroid, which is a portmanteau of the words "metro" and "android". It was co-developed by Nintendo's Research and Development 1 division and Intelligent Systems, and produced by Gunpei Yokoi. Metroid was directed by Satoru Okada and Yoshio Sakamoto (credited as 'Yamamoto'), and featured music written by Hirokazu Tanaka. Makoto Kano was tasked to create the scenario, and Hiroji Kiyotake, Hirofumi Matsuoka and Yoshio Sakamoto designed the game's characters. The character design for Samus Aran was created by Kiyotake. Officially defined as a scrolling shooter video game, Nintendo released Metroid for the Family Computer Disk System on August 6, 1986, and on the Nintendo Entertainment System in August 1987.

The production was described as a "very free working environment" by Tanaka, who stated that, despite being the composer, he also gave input for the game's graphics and helped name the game's areas. Regarding the music, Tanaka said he wanted to make a score that made players feel like they were encountering a "living organism" and had no distinction between music and sound effects. The only time the main Metroid theme is heard is when Mother Brain is defeated, to give the victorious player a catharsis. During the rest of the game, no melodies are present because Tanaka wanted the soundtrack to be the opposite of the upbeat tunes found in other games at that time. Part way through development, one of the developers asked the others, "Hey, wouldn't that be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?", an idea which was incorporated into the game (though the instruction manual for the game uses the pronoun "he" to refer to Samus many times). Ridley Scott's 1979 horror film Alien was described by Sakamoto as a "huge influence" on Metroid after the game's world had been created. The development staff was affected by the work of the film's creature designer H. R. Giger, and found his creations to be fitting for the Metroid universe.

Nintendo attempted to set Metroid apart from other games by making it a nonlinear adventure-based game, in which exploration was a crucial part of the experience. The game often requires that players retrace their steps to progress, forcing the player to scroll the screen left in addition to moving it right, as was the case in most contemporary games. Metroid was also considered one of the first to impress a feeling of desperation and solitude on the player. Following The Legend of Zelda, Metroid helped pioneer the idea of acquiring tools to strengthen characters and help progress through the game. Up until that point, most ability-enhancing power-ups like the Power Shot in Gauntlet (1985) and the Starman in Super Mario Bros. offered only temporary boosts to characters, and they were not required to complete the game. In Metroid, however, items were permanent fixtures that lasted until the end. In particular, missiles were mandatory to finish the game.

After defeating Mother Brain, the player is given an end screen based on the time it took them to get there. Metroid is one of the first games to contain multiple endings, with five in total. In the third, fourth, and fifth endings, Samus Aran appears without her suit, and for the first time, reveals herself to be a woman. In Japan, the Disk Card media used by the Disk System allowed players to save up to three different games in Metroid, similar to the three save slots in The Legend of Zelda in the West. Use of an internal battery to manage files was not fully realized in time for Metroid's international release. The Western versions of Metroid use a password system that was new to the industry at the time, in which players write down a 24-letter code and re-enter it into the game when they wish to continue a previous session. Codes also allow for changes in gameplay; the "NARPAS SWORD" grants Samus infinite ammunition, health, all power-ups, and a modified Ice Beam. The "JUSTIN BAILEY" code lets the player play as Samus without her Power Suit, which was thought by some to be the only way to use the feature, however it is available simply by beating the game quickly enough to reveal Samus wearing a leotard at the ending sequence. However, the game on the Nintendo 3DS becomes inoperable if the player enters a code that the game does not recognize.