(Amazing header art from the main articles page is a fan piece done by one Dennou Manjuu.)
Just like with the previous article, this isn’t going to be representative of what we normally do here on the Looking Glass. Rather than pulling up a chair and being casual-analytical, we’re getting pretty personal with this one, and it’s going to be structured in a more free-form way.
I love Metroid. I love the shit out of Metroid.
Twenty years since Metroid Prime landed as what, to this day, remains one of the greatest video games ever. If you aren’t old enough to remember what it was like in the years leading up to Prime’s launch, I’d like to put you in the mindset of absolute cynicism that gripped gaming magazines and discussion forums alike. Metroid as a first person shooter?
Back then, when the gaming community heard ‘first person shooter’, they associated it with games like Quake and Doom, where enemies were around every corner and it was you against the collective hordes of Hell, knee-deep in the dead. Meanwhile, Metroid’s crown jewel to that point was 1994’s Super Metroid, a very deliberately paced adventure that helped codify the Metroidvania genre along with Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. It seems so stupid to think back on, but people really were skeptical as heck. They thought relatively unknown developers Retro Studios were hard at work turning their beloved lost-in-an-alien-hive series into a frenzied twitch-trigger FPS.
In hindsight it’s so weird how so few of the prevailing voices were ready to think outside the box, but even those of us who had high hopes weren’t quite prepared for the absolute masterpiece that it was and continues to be.
When it landed, Metroid Prime brought us into a literal whole new dimension for the series. Wrecked Space Pirate labs bristled with tension and catastrophized, claustrophobic set-dressings, like something out of Event Horizon or Alien. Ancient ruins dripped with an air of forlorn majesty. Samus’s visor fogged up and took on raindrops. Snowy vistas really did feel like the edge of the world; larger-than-life boss battles felt bestial, iconic and kinetic.
But then, this article isn’t really going to be about Metroid Prime specifically, is it? I didn’t come into this with a whole lot of interest in doing a simple retrospective that ends up just being a standard review time-displaced by twenty years. Rather, I felt I needed to talk about the impact that this game had on me, playing it at thirteen years old – first at launch via rental in November 2002, then a month later receiving my very own copy at Christmas. Some of this will be about the game itself, but if you’re just wanting analysis and retrospective on Prime itself, these might not be the missile upgrades you’re looking for.
Last time, I made a very unexpected sort of article where I talked about the absolutely irreplaceable impact that Star Fox Adventures had on me, maybe not so much for the game itself, but for the road it set me on to this day. I mentioned how 2002 was the same year I realized the pressing need to tell stories, the same year I really fell in love with music, and how I was drawn to video games as a place where I could vibe creatively. Enter Metroid Prime, a game absolutely washed in atmosphere so dense that it’s a wonder I ever found my way back out. Or did I, really?
But in that sense, my love of Metroid Prime came about in a much more ‘developer-intended’ way than SFA, in the sense of all the hours I sunk into exploring Tallon IV, getting immersed in this fully realized world.
This is the kind of game where because of so many important things happening to me at once while I was playing it, those first few playthroughs really stick in my head with defined memories: playing the Phendrana base on my winter break that year while eating nachos, while the snow drifting outside the window mirrored the snow falling in Phendrana; my second playthrough later in 2003, listening to Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance for the first time while playing through the Phazon Mines, thus cementing a mental association between the two – I can pull these out all day, and if you grew up with the game too, I’m sure you can too.
In hindsight, Prime actually is quite a subtle game for much of its playtime. It’s about exploration, as you wind your way through Tallon IV and find out just what’s going on here. We remember the points of high action, like when the power goes out in the Phendrana base and suddenly you are playing a horror game, but there truly is a real ‘breathability’ to its arc. Retro really went all in on emphasizing ‘first person adventure’.
The scan visor was a gamble but outside of the occasional literal child complaining on forums that they didn’t want to read stuff in a game, the gamble paid off handsomely. It drives home the aesthetic of a game already drenched in atmosphere, and it couldn’t have been introduced with a more effective setpiece: right from the jump, the dilapidated Space Pirate station allows you ample opportunity to use the scan visor to get readouts on how the various Space Pirate corpses died. It’s gruesome, interesting stuff. That right there is the game’s way of teaching you that the scan visor will not be necessary outside of interacting with certain things in the environment to progress, but it will be something you’ll want to go out of your way to use. As enemies went, it was less burdensome on strategic play than, say, the tattle moves in the Paper Mario games (as those use up your partner’s turn), and provided lore plus hints on how to fight them.
Nowadays, games giving you optional lore to read, or not, as you progress through the game is a staple. I’m sure there were examples to be had before Prime, but I credit Prime with popularizing the narrative format in games. It really is perfect: optional lore pickups allow the player to set their own pace in consuming the world and the story, which is incredibly important. As games became more and more cinematic, able to tell more epic and involved stories, developers have constantly had to balance gameplay with narrative. Prime-style lore logs split the difference and let the player retain near-complete control over their experience.
In fact, these effect-details and optional pickups that add to the depth and richness of the world have become so ubiquitous in games like this that when a game with any sort of speculative nature has no lore or pickups whatsoever (say, the future-set Call Of Duty duology), it almost takes me out of the game, like the deadness and static nature of the world snaps me back from those spaces-beyond-places and to the feeling that I’m just looking at some digital cardboard cutouts.
While I was never a ‘part’ of the Metroid fan community in the sense of actively seeking out fan forums and participating heavily in the discourse, it was through Metroid Prime that I discovered the speedrunning community, and that enriched my life in a bit less personal, but still important way.
I’m not a speedrunner. It’s not that I lack the talent – world-class speedrunners will be the first to tell you that most anyone can do this if they’re willing to put in the grind and the effort and the hours. I’m just along for the ride. But what a ride it’s been.
Speedrunning was a different beast then, a niche way to expand the meta of certain games. I was there when OG Prime runners were staying up nights, hashing out ingenious tricks to cut down on time, skip items once thought essential, break boundaries once thought impossible. Strats were shared on Metroid2002 and speeddemosarchive and gameFAQs by short Quicktime uploads. I was there when a runner found a way to skip spider ball by tricking the Sun Tower’s event flag by falling from the top and letting a wall-bound enemy ‘catch’ Samus, then bomb-jump back up. It was brilliant. It was beautiful. It was art. I was there, Quiet Robe, three thousand years ago.
Funny thing is, when I say speedrunning used to be ‘niche’, it was so niche that developers didn’t really know what to do with it; Retro Studios answered these sequence breaks – many of which weren’t glitches, just using the in-game geometry and physics in extremely creative ways – with subsequent pressings of the game that put up invisible walls and other such barriers to keep players from doing it. They didn’t understand, taking the speedrunning community as unpaid post-release testers whose work had to be answered with a firm hand, rather than an incredibly cool burgeoning meta.
We’re actually pretty fortunate that the 1.0 North American copies of Prime retain all those classic speed tricks. Had the game been released today, they could have just patched it all out and made things a lot more complicated.
Speedrunning kept growing, from a niche meta to a community to a whole subculture that’s penetrated the gaming mainstream. We live in a golden era for speedrunning, as viewers: you can’t throw a rock on Twitch without hitting someone who’s been streaming their speedrun grind of a given game for at least seven hours straight, and literally any game you want to see has a speedrun scene to be found on Youtube.
And then you have Games Done Quick. I was there when it began as a humble charity event hanging on by the skin of its teeth, and look at it now. A twice-yearly event that pulls in millions of dollars each marathon for, respectively, the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders.
I talked a whole lot last time about how the echoes of our actions, be they warm or frigid, carry forward for better or for worse. This is a large-scale, real-deal example of that. Our little charity event is running into issues; let’s not cancel it, let’s do what we can; fast forward to how many millions of dollars raised for the sick and the needy? And even that first humble event wouldn’t have happened were it not for those players back in the Before Times, on boards and chats for Metroid Prime and Quake and Doom and Halo and all these other early-days speed games, staying up late in dens and dorms by the glow of their CRT monitors as they hashed out strats and skips. It’s not a stupid waste of time; let’s keep going deeper; let’s shave off a few more minutes; fast forward to how many millions of dollars raised for the sick and the needy?
In the mid-2010s, when a group of bad actors waged a misogynistic hate campaign on the gaming world, terrorizing, harassing, gaslighting and doxxing anyone who got in their way in the name of “taking back” the image of “being a gamer” in the name of all white straight male petulant little shits with dicks only measurable in quarks, I tell you that GDQ was a beacon of positivity for me that was desperately needed around that time.
On that note, the queer representation at the average GDQ event is absolutely wonderful to see. GDQ shows us the world as it really is, and how it can be when people aren’t mortally terrified to show their true selves, not the world how the psychotic alt-right freakshow would prefer it to be.
It sort of boggles the mind how much inspiration I’ve taken from Metroid in my own creative work, either overtly or subconsciously. I can tell you that chapter four of Seed Of Treachery, titled Nightmare In Steel, was always intended as my direct homage to the Metroid Prime trilogy’s ‘wrecked, dilapidated alien research base where something terrible happened’ setpieces, and you can certainly see a Prime-adjacent aesthetic deliberately invoked with a lot of other moments in the series, be it a few scenes on Everan (all mashed in and mixed up among that world’s other influences, Sauria, Pandora etc) or on Hivena (the hiven being, it’s no secret, strongly inspired by Metroid’s Space Pirates). And you can credit/blame Metroid Prime for any and all instances in Architects of a classic ‘reading/watching the log entry’ scene.
But I suspect a lot of the series’ influence on Architects comes in a more deep-rooted, molecular form, from how many little ideas I happened to come to while vibing in the games’ iconic areas and bathing in the atmosphere and wonderful music, to the aesthetics that put me exactly in the zone I like to be in to effectively conceptualize this sort of thing.
I can hardly express how happy I am that Metroid Dread has ushered in another era where Metroid feels cared-for as a series by its makers again. We really had no idea how good we had it in that golden age where we got Prime, Fusion, Zero Mission and Echoes all within two years of each other, then Corruption three years later before things took a hard sink.
So much of the conversation around Prime before its release was focused on looking backwards toward the masterpiece of Super Metroid, all while we had no idea that we were entering the halcyon days for the franchise.
But that’s time for you. It’s hard to think about it while you’re living it; fish don’t know they’re wet, and all that. But those times we’ve had on Tallon IV will never really leave us entirely, because Retro put their heart and soul into making a world that could live rent-free in our heads while we were living in it. Even though I haven’t talked about those other Primes or the 2D games released alongside them, I love all those games in their own way (hell, there was a time when I was playing so much Zero Mission that I was 100%ing the game daily as a matter of muscle memory); it’s just that Prime clamped its hooks in me at a point when its influence became something truly special in my life.
So yeah – I love Metroid. And by the groundswell of awesome fan work that’s been done of it over the years, be it musical tributes or indie Metroidvanias that clearly worship at the altar of what Metroid built, or just taking so much inspiration from the series in their own creative works (hi, a reader once described Eva from Architects as ‘if Samus were a Chozo’ and like he’s not wrong you guys), it’s clear to me that we’ve found in this series that world beyond the world where clock-time falls away and the cycle of inspiration can keep spinning and expanding.
Also because of the words ‘Chozo’ and ‘Torizo’, the meat chorizo always makes me think of Metroid. So I suppose that’s just another little way all this has burrowed in to stay.
Actually – I don’t just have that massive First 4 Figures Meta-Ridley statue as some superfan flex. I’m not normally a statues person save for the stuff that comes in collector’s editions. But when I look at that statue, on display just off to the right in my eye-line in my entertainment center, it doesn’t just represent the game it’s from. To me, it represents everything that I carried forward from that special game two decades ago and continue to carry. Prime is one of the big reasons I turned out how I did, creatively. And for that I’m grateful.
See you next mission.