The History of Metroid: The Early Generation

Greatness Among Kings

            During its several decades in the gaming industry, Nintendo has made some of the most endearing and beloved gaming franchises in the rich history of video games. From Animal Crossing to Zelda, the company has developed an entire stable of creative genius, a vast collection of games that have garnered not only great acclaim but also sales that reach into the millions.
            Of course, not all of their series can have the tremendous success of Mario of Pokemon. Some of Nintendo’s lesser-known gems, though not necessarily embraced by the gaming community at large, still contain great significance in their respective genres. Even without the notoriety, they contain some of the greatest stories, characters and concepts in the entire Nintendo universe.
            And there is no better example of this than the Metroid series.

Aiming for the Stars
            Shigeru Miyamoto, resident Nintendo game guru and developer of many of Nintendo’s properties had become something of a “golden boy” for his company.  Nintendo’s new videogame system, the NES, had single-handedly revived the ailing game industry, and it was Shigeru Miyamoto’s creations, Donkey Kong and Mario, that everyone wanted to play.
            His success had lead to a bit of jealously within the company infrastructure; a man named Gunpei Yokoi, the creative mastermind behind many of Nintendo’s previous toy endeavors such as the Ultra Hand and later the GameBoy, was envious at how readily Miyamoto’s ideas were embraced. Yokoi held his own development team within the company, called simply R&D1 (Research and Development 1). The team had a few minor hits, such as Duck Hunt, but nothing that could stand up to the epic nature of most of Shigeru’s games. This, they determined, would have to change.
            Nintendo approached them and asked them to maintain the momentum of the NES (called the Famicom, or Family Computer in Japan), and the team assembled to create a game that was everything Mario was not. The game was called Metroid, and gone were the bright colors and cheer of the Mario universe, replaced with a moody sci-fi world among the stars.
It would also feature a system of power-ups for the player to collect, as well as a “non-linear” world that would allow the player to complete the quest as the chose. The innovations were plentiful, including heart-pounding self-destruct sequences, an eerie score and multiple endings, and Nintendo’s R&D1 team had formed a sense of drear isolation that had yet to be felt in any videogame, let alone one from Nintendo. But what kind of character would be sent to conquer this bleak world?

Enter the Hero…ine?
Artist Hiroji Kiyotake, one of Nintendo’s most affluent artists, was commissioned to design a robotic hero to tackle the dank halls of the Metroid world, as well as the monsters that it would combat along the way. Taking many cues from the Alien movie, he conceived Samus, an athletic hero clad in spacey armor that was, for all intents and purposes, male.
Even the pamphlet for the game described the hero as he, claiming, “He is the greatest of all the space bounty hunters”. But this was only a clever rouse on the part of the development team—the gaming world received one of its earliest shocks after discovering that, after the completion of the game’s quest, Samus greeted the player in nothing more than a bikini; Samus Aran was one of the first significant videogame heroines.

See Ya Later, Samus
            Nintendo asked Yunpei and his team over at R&D1 to create something new and great for its prized system. Between the Mario and Zelda titles, they knew they needed something different, but equally renowned, and the Metroid series was bourn of this ambition. The series would take another 5 years to reappear, and this time on Yokoi’s GameBoy, but the gears had been set in motion: Nintendo had yet another quality franchise under its belt, and adventure games were suddenly changed for the better.

 

CVG’s History of Metroid Pt. 1
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=173735
IGN’s History of Metroid
http://games.ign.com/articles/815/815011p1.html
Original Metroid Instruction Manual
http://www.neshq.com/games/m/metroid/metroidmanual.txt
Information about Specific Individuals
http://imdb.com/name/nm0948386/
http://imdb.com/name/nm1355523/