Development of Metroid Prime

The development of Metroid Prime lasted two and a half to threeZoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). Fascinating. We built the first Metroid Prime in a little over 3 years. That also included building a new game engine. ¶ Game development production times are getting longer and longer due to demands of higher fidelity and amount of content. Also team size management is a factor." 25 January 2023 1:51 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1618320548655947781 years from its inception, from 1999-2002. It is a first-person adventure for Nintendo GameCube, developed by Retro Studios, who later ported the game to Wii, as a separate re-release in Japan and as part of Metroid Prime Trilogy internationally. It was released in North America on November 18, 2002 to universal acclaim and critical success, becoming the best selling Metroid game until it was surpassed by Metroid Dread over 20 years later.
==Background==
After the release of Super Metroid in 1994, Metroid fans eagerly awaited a sequel, although it would be eight years before one was created. An installment for the Nintendo 64 was discussed by Nintendo in public, but it never entered production. Developer Shigeru Miyamoto explained that it was because Nintendo "couldn't come out with any concrete ideas". Later, Yoshio Sakamoto said Nintendo had approached a company (which he declined to name) about creating a 3D Metroid game on the console. They declined in part because they felt they could not develop a game equal to Super Metroid.https://web.archive.org/web/20100917192619/http://www.gamestm.co.uk/interviews/yoshio-sakamoto-discusses-metroid-64-metroid-dread-and-the-unwritten-future-of-the-warioware-series/
==Development==
===1998-1999===
Metroid Prime was developed as a collaboration between Retro Studios and important Nintendo EAD and R&D1 members. Retro Studios was created in 1998, through an alliance between Nintendo and former Iguana Entertainment founder Jeff Spangenberg. After establishing its offices in Austin, Texas in 1999, Retro received five game ideas for the future GameCube, despite not even having development kits yet. These games included Metaforce, Car Combat/Thunder Rally, Raven Blade and NFL Retro Football.
===2000-2001===
In 2000, Shigeru Miyamoto visited Retro Studios and noted the similarity of Metaforce to Metroid. Therefore, he recommended that they turn it into a Metroid game. Led to believe that the GameCube was more powerful than it was, Retro planned a traditional first-person shooter control system for Prime with right stick moving and left stick aiming.DidYouKnowGaming? "Metroid Prime Devs Share Secrets (EXCLUSIVE)". YouTube. April 17, 2022. Retrieved November 27, 2022. For more information on this, see the Metaforce article.
Nintendo producers, such as Miyamoto, Kensuke Tanabe and Kenji Miki, as well as Metroid series producer Yoshio Sakamoto, communicated with the Texas-based studio through emails, monthly phone conferences and personal gatherings. The game, like Metaforce, was developed with a third-person perspective for the first three months, but this was changed to a first-person perspective after Miyamoto intervened, causing much of what was already developed to be scrapped, including a vertical platforming section. Among the reasons for leaving the third-person perspective were Rare's trouble with the camera in Jet Force Gemini, shooting in third-person "not being very intuitive", and exploration being easier using first-person. Despite this, Sakamoto and Spangenberg preferred to keep it in third-person. The conflict over perspectives led to the resignation of the lead developer, John Whitmore (he later came to agree with Miyamoto's decision). At one point, Prime switched back to being a third-person game, before finally settling on first-person. Retro staff still chose to add in third-person moments, such as when the Morph Ball is in use or Samus uses a Save Station..
Metaforce, Car Combat and NFL Retro Football were canceled to establish focus on Prime, which made its first public appearance in the form of a ten second video at Space World 2000. In November of the same year, Retro Studios confirmed in the "job application" part of its website its involvement with the game, and at E3 2001, Prime was officially announced by Nintendo, receiving mixed reactions due to the change from 2D side scrolling to 3D first-person. By July 2001, there was an unproven report that the development of Prime and Raven Blade was troubled by engine problems, low morale and uninspired gameplay.IGN Staff. "Metroid, Raven Blade Blues". IGN. July 11, 2001. Retrieved June 23, 2023. https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/07/11/metroid-raven-blade-blues Raven Blade was canceled in 2001, ensuring that Prime was the only game in development.
===2001-2002===
Director Mark Pacini said Retro tried to make the game so that the only difficult parts would be boss battles, so players would not be "afraid to explore", because "the challenge of the game was finding your way around". Individual boss battles took two to three months to be developed.
Platforming in first-person went through multiple iterations before the team found a version that worked. The camera system was created by Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, who collaborated with Mark Pacini and Karl Deckard on making it function with platforming. At first, platforms had "lock points" where Samus could lock onto the middle of the platform, jump, and automatically land on it. This gave way to a subtle nudge of the camera at the apex of Samus's jumping.Kiwi Talkz. "#116 - Jack Mathews Interview (Metroid Prime Trilogy, Prototypes, Business, Armature Studios etc.)". YouTube. November 26, 2021. Retrieved June 7, 2022. (starts at 18:10)
According to Michael Mann, the game's development lasted roughly two and a half years, and had a team of 35 people according to Mike Wikan.KIWI TALKZ - #105 - Mike Wikan Interview (Metroid Prime Trilogy, Game Design, Crunch, Booz Allen Hamilton etc.) September 6, 2021. Retrieved September 18, 2021. Retro and Nintendo EAD collaborated on the production process, exchanging hundreds of emails, as well as telephone and video conferences, with occasional staff visits from both companies to Texas and Japan. EAD provided multicolor Excel spreadsheets with navigation cells to Retro, which outlined their vision of Prime.Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "When working on Metroid Prime, we would get these amazing multicolor spreadsheets from Nintendo EAD outlining the game. They mapped out the whole game in Excel cells and had clickable navigation and everything. Nintendo EAD are Excel wizards!" 10 March 2022 5:36 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1502050859915837442
Rooms in Prime were built as prototypes ("blue rooms" as they were created in blue grids) by the designers, who would add the gameplay elements before they were given to the art team. Their responsibility was then to add the appearance of the rooms while maintaining their gameplay functions. Doors were implemented as hidden loading screens, causing a compressed copy of the next room to load when opened. Retro staff licensed an open source decompression library (possibly LZO)Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "I didn't remember specifically. But it might have been LZO. 
http://oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/" 8 November 2022 8:41 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590157615941963776 to ensure easier loading of rooms, fixing memory fragmentation issues and allowing the rooms to be made larger without sacrificing performance.Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "Metroid Prime Dev Stories #4: How a compression library saved Metroid Prime. When rooms are streamed in behind those doors, we are loading a compressed copy of the room--geometry, textures, models and game data. How is it decompressed? 1/4" 8 November 2022 7:21 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590137508830285825Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "Most programmers know once the compressed copy is loaded in memory then space is allocated to decompress into. This means we need the memory for both the compressed and decompressed copy. The GameCube has 24MB of RAM and having both was too expensive. 2/4" 8 November 2022 7:21 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590137512923901955Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "We licensed an open source decompression library that allows allocation of a single decompressed sized block then load the compressed copy into the upper section of the memory block and *decompress it in place* overwriting the compressed copy. 3/4" 8 November 2022 7:21 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590137517072056320
75-80% of the game's content was added in the final six months of development, once the foundations for it had been set. Employees worked six-seven days a week, twelve hours per day in the final stretch.Kiwi Talkz. "#112 - Clark Wen Interview (Metroid Prime, Sound Design, Kenji Yamamoto, Mixing, SFX, Game Audio )". YouTube. October 23, 2021. Retrieved April 18, 2022. Late into development, Miyamoto re-mapped the GameCube controller's buttons by himself, improving the control scheme. Near the end of production, friends of developers would playtest the game with their progress monitored, and the staff would make improvements based on their feedback.Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "Metroid Prime Dev Stories #11: White Paper testing. In the last few months of the project, we invited friends of family to do “white paper” playtests of the game. They would play without help and we’d monitor their progress. 1/5" 12 November 2022 5:08 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1591553432573579264
Prime went gold in the middle of October 2002.Zoid Kirsch (ZoidCTF). "Metroid Prime Dev Stories #5: Going gold! After a long and difficult development process, Metroid Prime went gold near the middle of October 2002, about a month before release date since they had to press the discs. It’s one of the most memorable days of my life. 1/2" 9 November 2022 6:57 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590493890314129408 Shortly after its release, Retro was informed by Nintendo that a bad batch of GameCube CPUs had been shipped, but the only game that failed to run correctly on them was Prime. The code ran too fast for the CPUs to handle and had to be slowed down. However, Retro was only given one dev kit with the defective CPU, and it had to be cold before they could test the problem. Therefore, it was frozen, with tests occurring in 15 minute increments before it was re-frozen, and the process was repeated.Jack Mathews (jack_mathews). "My friend @zoidctf, "an engineer" on Metroid Prime, asked me to tweet about one of the weirder parts of Metroid Prime game dev for the upcoming 20th anniversary, so without further ado... 0/7 Metroid Prime Game Dev Story - The One Where We Fridged a GameCube. Shortly after Prime shipped, Nintendo told us that a "bad batch" of GameCube CPU's shipped, and apparently Prime was the only game that misbehaved on them. We saw videos and it was clear what was going on. 1/7 All animated objects were freaking out. I'll get into the techy reasons later, but the point was we needed to actually slow down some of our code, because it was running too fast for these CPUs to handle! We needed to be able to test this, but... 2/7 Nintendo only had one dev kit with this CPU. We couldn't detect the CPU, and if we slowed it down too much, the game's framerate would tank. If we didn't slow it down enough, it would glitch. Even worse, we had to burn disks for this kit. So each test was hours. Even weirder 3/7 Was to see the problem, the kit had to be cold. Like, freezer cold. So we literally had to put the kit in the freezer, test the game for 15 minutes tops, then start all over. It was crazy. 4/7 We literally were running the kit from the break room freezer to the TV, and loading save games as fast as possible to as many places as possible in 15 minutes, then trying new code, re-freezing, and back. I'll never forget it. 5/7 Techy stuff: Our skinning used the locked cache DMA to read in data and the write gather pipeline to write it out. Most of the Nintendo samples used the locked cache for both read and write, so my method was a bit faster. But it also hit memory bandwidth limits. As I recall, 6/7 The issue was that the write gather pipe on these broken CPU's wouldn't stall when it was full or properly report its status, so we had to keep inserting NOPs in the code to slow it down just enough to stop stalls from happening, but not so much to slow down the game. 7/7 In case you were wondering, when someone called support about this animation problem, Nintendo actually sent them a new game disc with this updated code! That's how we did "patches" back in the old days! 8/7" 10 November 2022 11:50 a.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/jack_mathews/status/1590748636144467973
==Audio==
Kenji Yamamoto, assisted by Kouichi Kyuma, composed the music for Prime. The soundtrack contains remixes of tracks from previous games in the series, because Yamamoto wanted "to satisfy old Metroid fans. It's like a present for them." The initial Tallon Overworld theme is an arrangement of Metroid's Brinstar theme, the music in Magmoor Caverns is a remix of that of Super Metroid's Lower Norfair area, and the music during the fight with Meta Ridley is a remix of the Ridley boss music first featured in Super Metroid, which has been remixed and featured in most Metroid games since.
According to Clark Wen, the lead audio designer for the first two Prime games, the game was "designed originally to be played without music."Wen, Clark (exile5ound). "Most people don't know it but Metroid Prime 1 was designed originally to be played without music. It's all about the isolation. #Metroid" 20 Jun 2017 7:54 p.m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/exile5ound/status/877298609116532736 He later clarified that this was never an official direction from the team, but a worst case scenario since it took a long time to find a composer for the game; Yamamoto did not step up until later in development."Interview: Clark Wen". Shinesparkers 2018-06-02. Retrieved 2018-06-02. Tommy Tallarico and Joey Kuras from Tommy Tallarico Studios were aided in creating the firsts sound effects at the start of development.
Wen was inspired to continue the "lineage" of sound design from Metroid and Super Metroid in Metroid Prime. Wen was influenced by the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, where the sound made by the helicopter blades was synthesized. This sound had an "otherworldly" feel to Wen and he was inspired to use the same technique to create realistic sounds with synthesis in Prime. This approach was also used in Japanese television series and tokusatsu that Wen had watched, where sound effects would be more stylized compared to American television. He sought to pay homage to classic video game sounds rather than using Hollywood quality audio and music as other studios were at the time. The synthesizers Wen used included Absynth, MetaSynth and Access Virus.
The game's soundtrack was nearly composed by the English electronic music duo Autechre, which consists of Sean Booth and Rob Brown. Both of them are credited under Special Thanks in the original North American version of Prime. In a 2013 AMA interview, Booth said that he signed a non-disclosure agreement and could not discuss his exact involvement with the game.Sean Booth: "sorry we signed an NDA". We Are The Music Makers. November 2, 2013. Retrieved April 17, 2022. https://forum.watmm.com/topic/81109-aaa-ask-autechre-anything-sean-and-rob-on-watmm/?do=findComment&comment=2084171 Wen later explained that Retro Studios had approached Autechre to compose for Prime, and used some of their work in demo levels, but Nintendo rejected them. Retro sent Nintendo a list of composers they wanted to approach, including Jake "virt" Kaufman, none of which were approved. In a 2022 AMA stream, Booth confirmed Autechre's near involvement for the first time.Whitley Striber. "Autechre Sean QUICK AMA 7/30/2022 Twitch". YouTube. July 30, 2022. Retrieved August 9, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sihCO_RN1tc (starts at 32:24)
Joseph Toscano submitted a musical demo that remixed the Title theme to Retro Studios, but he was ultimately passed over by Nintendo.ZhayTee - Metroid Prime Demo - YouTube[ downloads ] After six months, Nintendo offered Yamamoto to Retro, who immediately accepted. All of the music he composed was well liked by the team, with only minor adjustments needing to be made. Yamamoto was particular about the use of Prime's music, and gave Retro a spreadsheet with every single music cue he wanted and when they would play. Some scenes would have multiple music cues. Andrew McKenzie of Hafler Trio is also credited under Special Thanks, suggesting he was among the musicians considered.
The night before Prime went gold, Yamamoto requested that Wen make about a dozen last minute changes, which he worked on until the early hours of the morning. Wen felt it was the right decision in the end.
==References==
Category:Real-world