Yoshio Sakamoto does not like being called the creator of Metroid. Giving his first talk of its kind, at the Game Developers Conference in 2010, he told the audience that the original game had been worked out by a team with no experience to draw on. He preferred to think of himself as the one who brought Samus up: “Metroid’s real parent,” he joked, “is surely the Queen Metroid.” He then went through a career that most of his audience had never seen. Alongside the Metroid games he directed, it included horror adventures that never left Japan, and the WarioWare series of microgames.
Joining Nintendo
Sakamoto was born in Nara Prefecture on 23 July 1959, according to a 2004 profile in the Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream, and studied design at Osaka University of Arts. He joined Nintendo in 1982, the same year that Satoru Iwata, later Nintendo’s president, started his working life. His first work there was design for Game & Watch, and Retro Gamer lists the arcade Donkey Kong Jr. (1982) among his games.
He was an artist first, and drawing for the Famicom was slow, careful work. He told Nintendo Dream how it was done before digitisers: a picture was drawn on graph paper, laid over a device with a grid of 16 by 16 LEDs, and filled in one square at a time, choosing each colour with a Famicom controller. “Three colours,” he remembered. R&D1’s first Famicom game was Balloon Fight (1985), and Sakamoto said he worked on it and on Wrecking Crew the same year. At GDC he added that Balloon Fight’s programmer was Iwata himself.
Metroid
On Metroid (1986), made by Gunpei Yokoi’s R&D1 department, Sakamoto said, “I am credited as a designer”. The ending credits list him under a nickname, “Shikamoto”. Retro Gamer’s 2010 history of the series goes further and names him as the game’s director, working alongside Yokoi, and says he wanted to make something unlike the games of Shigeru Miyamoto’s team. The on-screen credits name Satoru Okada as chief director, so his exact role is disputed; the Metroid entry sets out the evidence.
He took no part in the Game Boy sequel, Metroid II: Return of Samus (1991), which Retro Gamer says was directed by Hiroyuki Kimura and Hiroji Kiyotake. He did take something from it. Metroid II ends with a baby Metroid hatching in front of Samus and following her as if she were its mother, and Sakamoto said that scene inspired Super Metroid.
Famicom Detective Club
The games that set his style were two text adventures for the Famicom Disk System, Famicom Detective Club (1988) and Famicom Detective Club Part II: The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989). They were horror and suspense stories, played by choosing commands from a menu, and they were the first games he wrote.
His model was the Italian horror director Dario Argento, whose films Suspiria and Deep Red he had admired when he was young. Sakamoto told the GDC audience what he had learned from them: a director frightens an audience by controlling mood, timing, foreshadowing and contrast. Argento’s mood came from progressive rock music, cut off at just the right moment so that a sound effect could change the scene. Part II, Sakamoto said, was his homage to Argento, and he went on using the same four tools in every game after it.
Super Metroid
Super Metroid (1994) was made by Nintendo’s R&D1 with the developer Intelligent Systems. Sakamoto told Retro Gamer in 2011 that he was “the director in charge of game design”, with Makoto Kanoh as producer and Tomomi Yamane as main designer. Only three of the original Metroid team worked on it, Sakamoto among them. The rest of the Nintendo side were young trainee developers.
The team deliberately used few words. “We really didn’t want to explain things to the player using too many words,” Sakamoto said. “We just wanted to let them play and be able to work things out for themselves.” The map was built so that a player could not move on without exploring, and would sometimes end up back at a starting point, forced to stop and think about the area.
The new hardware brought new problems. The Super Famicom needed many more sprites and much more artwork, so the whole team shared the drawing, and the result was “a complete mishmash of styles” that Yamane had to redraw into one design. Development took two to three years and overran. By the end, Sakamoto said, the old Nintendo building had become “a boarding house for the Super Metroid team”, with a shared nap room that another department complained “smelled like a zoo”. Yokoi, who oversaw the project without working on it day to day, grew angrier as the deadline slipped. Once the game was finished, though, Sakamoto said Yokoi played it constantly, and told other developers who brought him action games to go away and play Super Metroid.
At GDC Sakamoto singled out one idea from it. Near the end of the game he took control away from the player for a moment to show a dramatic scene, which he believed was unusual in an action game at the time.
Back to Samus
Sakamoto directed the next two 2D Metroid games on the Game Boy Advance. Metroid Fusion (2002) used words to tell its story, where Super Metroid had used none. Metroid: Zero Mission (2004) remade the NES original with a new scenario, and introduced Samus’s Zero Suit. He was producer of Metroid: Other M (2010) on the Wii, and public sources name him as producer of Metroid Dread (2021).
WarioWare and other games
Sakamoto also led a Nintendo development group that made much less serious games. In 2005 Edge described him as manager of the software development department behind WarioWare. He produced four WarioWare titles, but said the series did not come from his own ideas and that he produced it “from a slight distance”. The first he produced, WarioWare: Twisted! (2004), came about when an engineer in his team, asked to evaluate a gyro sensor, used it to control microgames. Sakamoto took the prototype straight to Iwata to show it off. The project really started, he said, when Iwata, spinning a Game Boy Advance on a chair to test a program that played a record as the machine turned, muttered “how silly”. WarioWare: Touched! was a launch game for the Nintendo DS.
He also presented Tomodachi Collection (2009) for the DS, a game about Mii characters living together, among his games. Nobody had expected it to be a hit, he said, and within a year it was close to three million sales in Japan.
Edge’s report of the 2010 GDC talk picked up one more story. He said that he only understood how deeply a game could touch its players when a Metroid fan sent him handmade chocolates, several years after the game came out.
Sources
- Nintendo, “Yoshio Sakamoto: GDC lecture” (Japanese transcript of his Game Developers Conference 2010 talk; quotations here are translated), parts 1–3: credited as “designer” on Metroid; “Samus’s foster parent” and the Queen Metroid; no part in Metroid II and its ending as the inspiration for Super Metroid; director of Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission; producer of Other M; producer of four WarioWare titles and the origin of Twisted!; Tomodachi Collection; Famicom Detective Club as the first games he wrote; Balloon Fight and Iwata; Dario Argento, mood, timing, foreshadowing and contrast. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/interview/slsjr3oj/vol1/index_gdc1.html
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Hironobu Sakaguchi × Yoshio Sakamoto (2010, Japanese), part 1: Iwata and Sakamoto starting work in 1982. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/interview/slsjr3oj/vol1/index.html
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, “The complete history of Metroid”: Sakamoto as director of Metroid with Yokoi; the directors of Metroid II; his return for Super Metroid; Fusion and Zero Mission.
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 5, 2011, “The making of Super Metroid”, interview by Jonti Davies: his role, Kanoh and Yamane, the three original team members, the design without words, the mishmash of styles, the boarding house and nap room, Yokoi’s reaction; his “developer highlights”, including Donkey Kong Jr. (1982).
- Edge issue 148, April 2005, WarioWare feature: producer of Twisted! and Touched!, manager of the department behind the series.
- Edge issue 214, May 2010, GDC report: Argento, WarioWare and the fan’s chocolates.
- Kyoto Report, “Staff Credits – Metroid (NES, 1986)” (web, secondary): the “Shikamoto” credit and Satoru Okada as chief director. http://kyoto-report.wikidot.com/metroid-credits
- Nintendo Dream, interview with four Famicom Disk System developers, 6 and 21 September 2004 (Japanese; republished on Nintendo DREAM WEB, 21 February 2023): his birth, university, joining Nintendo and Game & Watch work; drawing with graph paper, LEDs and a Famicom controller; Balloon Fight as R&D1’s first Famicom game and Wrecking Crew. https://www.ndw.jp/disksystem-interview-230221/
- Wikipedia, “Yoshio Sakamoto” (web, secondary): Metroid Dread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Sakamoto