One thing that many people underestimate in the video game industry is that developers only work on games that eventually come out and are known about for years. The fact is that studios can sometimes be working on multiple projects all at once that’ll never see the light of day for one reason or another. If you don’t believe us, ask Retro Studios. Yes, the team behind some of Samus Aran’s greatest adventures have had their fair share of ups and downs, and in the newest episode of “Did You Know Gaming?” they revealed that they had some big ideas that Nintendo “didn’t get.”
In the episode, the team members recalled a game that they had prototyped that was similar to Portal, which was big at the time but then had some unique elements that would go on to make itself stand out. However, when they showed it to some of the people at Nintendo of Japan, they “didn’t get it” because they had not played the hit title from Valve. Why? Because apparently, they were of the mindset that if “they didn’t invent it,” they didn’t want to play it. The guy who programmed the game even tried to give them a copy to showcase its fun before looking at the prototype again, but they “didn’t accept gifts.”
The episode also chronicled another game that was seen by others but was canned because it was going in too many different directions due to shifting management, and the Nintendo Gamecube couldn’t handle what they were putting on it. So you might be thinking, “How did these guys make a great Samus title if they couldn’t get their other projects off the ground?”
Well, it’s because they did another prototype that reminded Shigeru Miyamoto of the Morph Ball, so he offered to have them do Metroid Prime. But there was a twist in that, as the episode revealed:
“Miyamoto didn’t care if we killed it. If we did a bad job, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. It wasn’t one of his games. Both among NOA and some of the Nintendo Japan guys, would say basically ‘you guys get this because he doesn’t care that much about it’.”
Such confidence in their skills… The irony is that Retro Studios crushed it and made an incredible trilogy. Then they helped Donkey Kong get his groove back before being asked to return to Samus. Hopefully, we’ll hear more on that game soon enough.
