“Edge will admit it had its doubts,” began the magazine’s review in January 2003. Nintendo had handed one of its most revered series to an outside studio “only a few had heard of”, and that studio, Retro Studios of Austin, Texas, was making it as a first-person game. When Shigeru Miyamoto held back the playable demo at the E3 show in 2001 because of worries about the controls, “alarm bells rang”. Metroid Prime then earned nine out of ten, and four months later Edge named it game of the year: the finest game the magazine had played in twelve months, and “one of the finest 2D-to-3D transitions yet seen”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Retro Studios, Austin, Texas. Publisher: Nintendo.
- Released: November 2002 in North America, at $50; February 2003 in Japan; 21 March 2003 in Britain.
- Key people: Mark Pacini (lead designer) and Todd Keller (lead artist) at Retro; Kensuke Tanabe and Shigeru Miyamoto at Nintendo.
- Setting: the planet Tallon IV.
- Visors: combat, scan, thermal and X-ray.
- Sequels: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004), Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (2007), Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (2025).
A studio in Texas
Retro Studios was set up in 1998 with Nintendo’s backing, and partly staffed with people from Iguana, the Austin studio behind Turok. Iguana’s founder, Jeff Spangenberg, had sold it to Acclaim and used the money to start the new company. It began several GameCube projects at once, among them an American football game, a vehicle combat game and an action-adventure. Retro Gamer’s account of the development says Miyamoto was not impressed by most of what he was shown on a visit, but liked one team’s action-adventure prototype with a female lead, and Retro was given Metroid.
The idea of seeing through Samus Aran’s eyes came from Miyamoto. “Mr Miyamoto came to us with the idea of playing a Metroid game from the first-person perspective,” Pacini recalled. “He felt that the best way to play a 3D game where the character had a gun was from a first-person viewpoint. At first, we were not seeing his vision and we knew the fans would have the same initial reaction.” Early screens show Samus in third person in the Chozo Ruins. The other projects were cancelled in 2001, and dozens of staff were laid off. In 2002 Nintendo bought the shares in Retro it did not already own, making the studio wholly its own, and Spangenberg left; the rest of the team worked on to finish the game.
A first-person adventure
Nintendo called it a first-person adventure, not a shooter. “To us,” Pacini said, that “meant that the core gameplay was not about shooting enemies but rather the immersive experience of being Samus and exploring the environment.” Their model was the Super NES game: “Our main inspiration was Super Metroid. That’s all you need.”
Tanabe, who oversaw the game for Nintendo, asked Retro for “a visor system … in order to make it clearly new and differentiated from first-person shooter games”. The scan visor turned the world into something to read. Samus could scan almost anything, from creatures to the logs left by space pirates, and each scan was stored. Edge found that scanning a new room before doing anything else “soon becomes second nature”. The thermal visor showed enemies in the dark. In a fight the player could lock on to an enemy and circle it instead of aiming freely, and when Samus rolled into her Morph Ball the camera pulled back to third person for puzzles, half-pipes and magnetic rails. The planet was one continuous place. “The player was able to play the entire game without a break in the action,” Pacini said, because there were no loading screens.
Everything was arranged the way the 2D games had been. Samus begins with few abilities, finds doors and ledges she cannot yet pass, and comes back later with the upgrade that opens them. Edge wrote that “deconstructing the layout and deciphering clues left in the design by the developer to find routes to a new room is an absolute joy”, and praised a rotating 3D map. It had complaints too. Strafing by holding the left shoulder button, and looking up and down by holding the right, felt awkward at first. The grapple beam arrived too late in the adventure, crash bugs got through, and making some scanning compulsory struck the magazine as “unnecessarily punitive” for completists.
Owners of the Game Boy Advance Metroid Fusion, released the same month in America, could link the two with a cable. That unlocked Samus’s Fusion suit and a copy of the original NES Metroid.
Reception
Edge’s review found that the series had been recreated so faithfully that “within minutes of starting the game everything feels exactly the way you’d expect it to”. In its awards in May 2003 the magazine named Metroid Prime game of the year, ahead of Neverwinter Nights, and gave it its audio award, for a soundtrack and sound effects that worked together to “envelop the player”. It placed Retro Studios third among developers of the year, and argued that whatever Nintendo’s involvement, “the majority of the work (and by definition significant development decisions) remained the responsibility of the Austin-based team”.
Later history
Retro made two sequels with Tanabe as Nintendo’s producer: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes for the GameCube in 2004, directed by Pacini, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Wii in 2007. The three were collected for the Wii, with pointer controls, in 2009. Retro went on to make Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010), and when Edge interviewed Tanabe and Retro’s president, Michael Kelbaugh, in 2011, they described how Retro had “gradually come to really think like Nintendo”. In February 2023 Nintendo released Metroid Prime Remastered for the Switch, rebuilt by Retro, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond followed in December 2025.
Sources
- Edge issue 119, January 2003: review, nine out of ten; the doubts, the E3 2001 demo, the scan and thermal visors, the lock-on, the controls, the map and the Morph Ball. Metroid Fusion is reviewed in the same issue.
- Edge issue 123, May 2003, pp. 53–62, “Edge Awards”: Metroid Prime as game of the year (p. 56), with its faults (the grapple beam, crash bugs, compulsory scanning), and audio winner (p. 62); Neverwinter Nights runner-up (p. 57); Retro Studios third among developers.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, pp. 60–61, “Future Classic: Metroid Prime”: Retro’s founding in 1998 and the former Iguana staff, Miyamoto’s visit and the female-led prototype, the switch from third to first person, Nintendo’s purchase of “the majority shares” in 2002 and Spangenberg’s departure; key people Mark Pacini and Todd Keller; the Metroid Fusion link and the 2009 Wii collection.
- IGN Unplugged issue 1, April 2001, p. 26: Car Combat and Football 2002 stopped and more than 20 Retro staff laid off; issue 5, August 2001, p. 8: Raven Blade cancelled on 20 July 2001 and 26 staff laid off.
- Hyper (Australia) issue 105, July 2002, p. 12, “Nintendo secures developer”: Nintendo bought the remaining shares and Retro was “wholly owned by Nintendo”.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, p. 88: Andy O’Neil on Spangenberg, Iguana and Retro’s early projects.
- Retro Gamer: 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die, p. 13: Mark Pacini and Kensuke Tanabe on Metroid Prime (Miyamoto’s idea, the “first-person adventure”, Super Metroid, the visor system, no loading screens).
- Hyper (Australia) issue 131, September 2004: round-table interview with Retro Studios and Nintendo; Tanabe’s role as producer.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 187, January 2005: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, with Mark Pacini as game director.
- Edge issue 227, May 2011: interview with Kensuke Tanabe, “the Nintendo producer who oversaw the Metroid Prime trilogy”, and Retro Studios president Michael Kelbaugh.
- Nintendo Official Magazine issue 126, March 2003: UK release on 21 March; the X-ray visor.
- Wikipedia, “Metroid Prime” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): release dates, Metroid Prime Remastered (February 2023) and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (2025). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_Prime