Retronauts - 791: Metroid x 40: The Successors

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and Kate Willaert trek back to the starting point now that they're equipped with the skills and tool to unlock the second half of their discussion of Metroid's 40th anniversary.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This weekend Retronauts, we're Samus Aaron on the side of caution. Hi, everyone. Well, yes, hello. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. Dishing out amazing Metroid-related puns for you this early a.m. This is episode 791, or, as we like to call it around here, episode 787, part two. That's right.

This is a follow-up to what was supposed to be a single episode talking about Metroid's 40th including its precursors and successors. And we only got to the precursors part. We did talk about the 40th anniversary. So that's okay. But there was a lot in the notes that we did not get to. And so that's what this episode is for. This is cleanup on aisle 791. It is taking care of all the business that was not previously taken care of. And then I don't know if I'll ever have anything to say about Metroid again. I'm sure this is the last time I will. ever podcast about this game and franchise. So savor it. I would hate to beat a dead horse. So that's my claim and I'm sticking to it for at least five hours. So who else do we have here?

Making a rare appearance in the United States of America. That's probably me. My name is a diamond fight. And yeah, I'm on the road so I am punless. Repeat, punless. So when you travel, Are you not allowed, it's like a TSA thing, you're not allowed to take puns with you? It's just, it's the environment. Everything I say has to be carefully metered to my surroundings. And right now I'm just, I'm staring at a little girl's rooms, there's unicorns everywhere. I just, I don't know. I, it wouldn't, it wouldn't seem right to make, make a joke about a 40-year-old video game on the air.

I don't know. Okay, well, in that case, I hope that this, this recording is full of whimsy for you. And also we have here Hello, Critical K is here as well And I have not acquired the pun upgrade yet So no puns for me That's a late game upgrade You don't get that until you're old

I would say You know, it's a dad joke thing But I guess it's more of an uncle joke for me But in any case There is a point in life where there is a younger generation and suddenly you realize I have to tell stupid jokes to them and make them upset with me. But not like upset in a bad way, not in a like traumatizing way, just in the like, can you believe this person kind of way? So that's something you have to

look forward to as you come into your maturity and eventually hit middle age. Yeah. Good way to start. Good way to start, by the way. Take it easy. You know, eat yourself in. Eat some Indian food in Japan, that lends itself to a lot of low-hanging jokes that I always pull out of my pocket. Low-hanging fruit, such as mango and tamarind. Well, yeah, exactly, yes. All right. Metroid, I'm sure you've both heard of it. I'm sure you both have things to say about it.

Indubitably. No, actually, completely forgot all those things we talked about a few weeks. ago. Go ahead. I can't tell you how much I would love to derail this entire episode and make it entirely about the making of Metroid, except that

I can't, because we don't really know that much about the development. Like, I have so many questions for certain people who worked on those games if only we had access to anyone, anyone, you know.

Some people have a little access to Yoshio Sakamoto, but he's not even, his role in this is smaller than people typically think. Yeah, he was kind of a pinch hitter. Kind of did a Koji Igarashi a la Castlevania Symphony of the Night where he sort of stepped in later in development as opposed to being there from the start as the lead. I did get to interview Sakamoto. It's been a long time now, probably like 15 years ago, which I believe was tied to OtherM. That sounds right. Yeah, yeah. So we discussed Sammas's rich inner life, but not a lot about the original Metroid.

You know, it's one of those things where you have access to this person, but you realize that you're being given access to them by their corporate overlords. for a specific reason. And you can't really deviate too far from that. Otherwise, you will not get asked back to have access to anyone ever again. So it's a tricky, tricky line access. It's one of those things. Access journalism, one of the great parts of our country. I can only imagine how the staff would react their faces every time you ask question and you don't use the word baby.

Like, oh, can we guess, can we steer this around back to the baby? There's a baby in this conversation? The hatchling? Can we talk about the hatchling? No, it's the baby. There was the baby. There was the baby Metroid. There was the baby Ridley.

And even Samus was kind of a baby in that one. But we're not talking about Metroid other M because we don't have to. We don't have to acknowledge it. We can just elide right over it. Just pretend it wasn't there. So let's talk about the Metroid that was good and influential. to a certain degree, and groundbreaking to a certain degree. And certainly, as I talked about last week at Long Island, RetroExpo, rewired my brain.

How did this crazy Metroid thing get to happen? Well, Nintendo, as you may know, began in this world as a playing card manufacturer, and that has nothing to do with Metroid. Eventually, though, they got into electronic gadgets and G-Ga-Gos and Gizmos. And that led them into the world. world of video games. And when Donkey Kong was a huge hit, they said, video games are what we do. This is our whole personality now. And eventually that led to Metroid. But I was curious if any of you have thoughts about how to flesh in that narrative, because it's a little bare bones the way I tell

it. Well, the way that I tell it, are we talking about the beginning of Metroid's development or how they got to, how Nintendo got to... This was still how Nintendo got here. How did it got here? I see. Well, I guess Donkey Kong is a big component, which I have been working on a – I released a video on the first chapter of a video. Oh, my gosh, I need to finish it one day. But so, you know, Donkey Kong was this game that Shigiru Miyamoto was put on as the developer.

of because they needed to they needed to use up a bunch of boards for this radar scope game that hadn't done as well as they hoped and so Donkey Kong was just kind of like this experiment replacement thing ended up being

a huge hit that broke Nintendo finally in the US. It was also though became like the first platformer game really like it was inspired by space panic, which looks platformer-esque,

but there's no jumping, so I don't consider it a platformer. It's more of a ladder climbing game. Yeah, it's a gravity-based game, for sure, because you fall through the holes that you drill, but your little guy can only drill, not jump. It's kind of like Load Runner, actually. Load Runner is just really a...

Well, any game that requires jumping would necessitate a dedicated jump man. Or a woman. Yes. Jump person, shall we say. Yes. The thing about Donkey Kong being a platformer, though, is that I feel like it's one specific

level of Donkey Kong that really like reveals the potential of what a platformer could be. The other levels all feel like, kind of just like, oh, this is space panic. Space panic with conveyor belts and pie or space panes. panic with bolts in the floor. Yeah. So one of the interesting things that's kind of come out recently about Donkey Kong is we all know the story about how Ikigame Sushinki did the contract work on developing the board and the programming for Donkey Kong because Nintendo didn't have a lot of internal expertise on,

you know, arcade hardware. Like they worked with companies like Sharp to, and I can't remember who else, to produce. their standalone TV consoles, like the TV Game 15 or Color TV Game 15, whatever. So, you know, they contracted out a lot of work to other firms. And supposedly someone from, I believe, Ikegami recently was posting online about how when the concept of Donkey Kong was brought to them, you know, started out as a Popeye game. and then the license was not secured. So they quickly pivoted and made it basically like an Ersat's King Kong.

The concept was just the original level, the first level, with the girders that are slanted. You know, they're sloped at an angle. So barrels roll down them and there are ladders. And according to this person, again, you know, it's, I don't know if the claims have been verified, but they said that they, you know, Ikegame's designers said that's not enough, and so they created additional levels for it, which means that they were kind of the ones who invented the platformer. So the source of this wasn't an internet post. It was a magazine article in a Japanese tech magazine.

This article came out back in the 90s, but was never, like, properly translated into English. I actually headed up getting the translation crowdfunded by schmoplations and like this dude like in terms of verification Nintendo's never going to say I was right but this dude like at Ikagami they have like these documents still

the production documents and when he wrote this thing he went back to those documents and was reading through those because he was like, you know, like already people's memories are like, oh, yeah, what did happen on that game? So I feel like a lot of what he's saying is probably the accurate story, where it seems like it was possibly someone at Ikagami who suggested the whole jumping in. But it's in a weird gray area because there are other versions of the story that sound like, You know, like it was such a collaborative thing. It's really hard to say in these meetings that they had, like, when they're spitballing, like, well, what did Miyamoto say, you know, like, did he, what did he suggest?

Or what did Gunpei Yokoi suggest, you know, and things like that. Right. And that makes sense for a planning meeting when people are, you know, just trying to figure things out and tossing ideas around. In any case, Ikegami were the ones who made it happen because they did the programming work on it. So we can say that platforming in a video game was an idea whose time had come and required many great minds to collaborate and bring it together. Anyway, so that's Donkey Kong, and that launched many great things for Nintendo, including the Game and Watch series and eventually the Famicom, which was kind of a groundbreaking home console that was specifically designed to play a great game of Donkey Kong.

That was the ambition with it, nothing more than that. And yet, the hardware designer, Masayuki Uemura, saw that technology becomes obsolete and that extensibility is a great thing to put into hardware to kind of curtail obsolesoles. So he gave the Famicom the ability to connect to external processors, RAM, you know, just all kinds of external devices to extend the capabilities of the core hardware. And he did that by making sure that the cartridge connectors, the pins in the cartridge slot, had leads into more than just, you know, loading games into RAM to be processed. Like there were more substantial connections. I am not a technical enough person to explain this coherently.

Nevertheless, it is significant to know that the NES, when it came to the US, was redesigned, and some of those pins were shifted to the underside of the system. And so therefore, the cartridge port did not have the ability to tap into the inner workings of the console to the same level as Famicom carts could. So that, you know, resulted in a lot of changes from during localization when things were brought over. But the point is that one of those extensible options came along in 1986 and that was the disc system, the Famicom disk system, which added more RAM and rewritable media and extra

sound channels and the ability to run off battery power. We talked about that recently on the Famicom Disc System anniversary episode, so we don't have to belabor that. That's actually going up tomorrow as of this recording. So it'll be fresh in people's brains. But I don't think that without the disk system, you get Metroid, at least not in the form that it took, and certainly not at the time that it arrived. So it was very much a product of its era, taking advantage, exploiting available technology, and trying to say, what can we do with new technology?

And the answer was some interesting, cool stuff. So in terms of, oh, sorry. Just I was going to add the fact that you could, the fact that you could save your game onto a disc, open up a lot of avenues, and they would have to sort of figure out how to do that properly on the other cartridge side after the fact. But certainly when Metroid was being made, and when Metroid first came out in Japan, it was all about, oh, hey, you can save your game and just start your game up, you know, continue where you left off, which really wasn't an option for any of the classic Mario Bros. games, those games like you turn them on, you play them, and that's it. I hope you had fun. Right. Kate? I was going to jump into the development of Metroid, but is there more that we want to say about the disk system? It's cool and neat and very fragile, and I love that little thing, even though it's full of frustrations. Look.

Oh, here we go. Reaching across. He's stretching. Look at that. Hey, that's the Metroid. A little friend Link. Link is like Samus, but wearing green and seen from the overhead view. They're pretty similar other than that.

I don't think Link can roll into a ball, but he does roll now. He has like the roll dodge. So Ocarina of Time really kind of leveled the playing field. Yeah. When is... And he gave a bombs? Oh, sorry, go ahead. When are they going to make a Sonic Metroidvania?

He rolls into a ball and zooms through tubes. Hmm. You should talk to Sega about that. I don't want to make that, but... But someone should make it. Seems like a good idea. Somewhere, Stu got very excited. Yeah.

It's actually kind of surprising that we haven't seen a Metroidvania Sonic or a Rogelight Sonic. I feel like Sega has this property where they could, you know, exploit it by branching out into other genres like they did, you know, 10, 15 years ago. But they've gotten very sort of consistent, shall we say, with the way they treat Sonic, not really going into weird places like, why don't we have BioWare make an RPG out of Sonic? I miss those days. Even if those things weren't necessarily good, at least they were just like throwing stuff against the wall. Well, I suppose if we brought up a rolling Metroidvania, we should probably mention Yoku's Island. What was it? Yoku's.

Yeah, Yoku's Island Express. Yeah. Yes, which is a pinball Metroidvania. Seems a natural fit after pinball quest. Sorry, what's up? Oh, I had a great deal of fun with that one. Yes. So I think, Kate, you wanted to talk about the creation of Metroid.

Is that correct? I feel like it's something that maybe we should address at some point in this up soon. Okay. Would you like to address it now? Yes. Well, so one thing I wanted to say about the development of Metroid is that I remember a time when it seemed like Gunpei Yokoi was always referred to as like the father of Metroid or something. Because I think it's because people like to look to the producer. as like somebody to talk to, you know, they usually have the producer as the point person to talk to during press stuff.

And I think that kind of got people thinking of him as the father of Metroid until he left Nintendo and then died. And then Sakamoto became the father of Metroid because he's now the press person that everyone talks to. But like he only joined this process like kind of in the last few months. Like the real MVP that people don't talk to or talk about enough when it comes to the creation of Metroid is Hiroshi Kiyotake, who was a artist at Nintendo who worked like R&D won, this department who worked on the game, mostly cut their teeth on like Game and Watch games. That's what like Goonpei Okoi was overseeing was like people helping out designing games for Game and Watch. Kiotake is an interesting person, because in the history of Metroid, he directed one of the games. He directed Metroid 2 himself, and that's the game that really turns the Metroid into this series that's really focused on environmental storytelling. That ended up being adopted by Super Metroid, and then the games, you know, as it continues onward, more and more story-based.

He was kind of the first put story in there. And that was a game that Sakamoto really had almost no involvement in. And Kiyotake almost was like almost the director of this first one in a way for like 13 months or so. He was the director. And it was just him and this programmer, Hirofumi Matsuoka. That's a difficult name for me to say. But he was the programmer. The two were working, like, were the only two people working on it for a while.

Matsuoka, incidentally, is the guy who, during the Super Metroid press stuff, infamously, when everyone was asked, is there, what's one thing about Samus Aaron that only you know? He was the one who infamously said that Samus is a new half. or essentially that she has a penis, which, you know, like, we're still not really sure if he intended that as kind of a bad joke or if he was serious. But either way, even if it was a bad joke, a lot of us have kind of decided, hey, if he's going to say it, then it's canon. And Samus is trans. But Qutake and Matsuoka, they're just working on the game by themselves for 13 months. It's coming up on release soon, and it's not really looking like a finished game yet. And so Sakamoto Chipson basically becomes the director.

All of our R&D1 kind of like get together and try to help out and finish this game in a very short amount of time. And what exactly this unfinished state look like? We still don't have a lot of details on. What we do know is that the spin attack was there. Kiyotake's part of his concept for the game, I guess, was this idea of like, what if instead of like avoiding enemies who could just jump right into him to kill him?

And Sakamoto, I think, looked at that and was like, what if we introduced that a little later and they kind of rejigged the game? But we also know there was a bunch of level design already. To what extent, how big the map was at that point? Was there, did they have a whole

system of needing to collect power-ups in order to reach other power-ups? We don't know all those specific details. Yeah, I feel like some of these early disk system games had a sort of rough start. I know Kid Icarus was also

kind of in a state and had to have someone come in at the 11th hour and sort of bring it home. And I would say the metric... Many of whom worked on Metroid. Yeah. But I would say the Metroid team, they did a little more successful work with that. It just, you know, it's a game that resonates with people more than Kidikaris does. And I think that's partly because Metroid is a little more not handholdy at the beginning, but it's a little more kind and gives people more runway to sort of figure things out, whereas Kidikris has that weird inverted difficulty curve where it starts out incredibly hard. And the longer you play, the more powerful pit becomes, and so it becomes a much easier game. So by the end,

you're just like steamrolling everything. But in the beginning, it just feels like this literal uphill battle. I feel like... I feel like a big part of why Kid Icarus didn't connect, at least with people in the U.S. is after Super Mario Brothers, like, we got this whole philosophy on game design that is kind of like trying to... Like, it's sort of... it teaches you the game as you play, and Americans hate reading manuals for whatever reason. But they even put naked harpy breasts in the American manual to entice the kids. Oh, really? Aw.

But, like, so this, kid Icarus, if you didn't read the manual, like, I remember the first time I played kid Icarus. And it starts out something like, oh, I want to like this game, and then I don't. Like, it's because, you know, when I played it again as an adult, I was like, oh, this is teaching you how to play the game wrong. If you don't read the manual, the first level teaches you how to play the game wrong because this wave of enemies comes at you, you shoot them. And you're like, all right, I did a good job. And then the wave comes again and you shoot them. And you're like, oh, they're just, they just infinitely spawn, I guess. So instead I'm just going to, like, not kill any enemies.

and I'm going to like just kind of zoom through this killing as few as you can. And that is wrong because if you avoid killing the enemies, you will not become strong enough to make it through the game. You're supposed to kill like everything that moves. And it just, it teaches you wrong, teaches you how to play it wrong. Those bastards. So anyway, yeah, we have Metroid. It came together at the end for,

a cool launch in Japan in August, 1986 for the disk system. About less than half a year after the disc system came out, and Nintendo was kind of putting some big, open-ended adventures, chewier games that take a little longer to work through than what they had been releasing to that point. Zelda, Super Mario Brothers 2, the loss levels, the mysterious Morissame Castle, and then Metroid. So that's a pretty good,

it's a pretty good lineup for the first like five or six months of the disc system. Pretty compelling set of offerings. And certainly they promoted it in Japan as I'm assuming based on the fact that you can find like little posters that you go to shops and stuff and they have little contemporary era posters with Shoa style Samis running around in her armor. I think that actually came packed in with the disc system hardware as like a like a flyer that was an advertisement, like a Shirashi kind of thing. I know they also used those as ads that at the very least appeared in the Famicom computer magazine.

I forget what the name of it was. But I've seen a bunch of those ads there. There were television ads. I've seen television ads from Japan and used them in my videos. So, yeah, so they gave Metroid a pretty good push. And it seems like it did okay. It didn't sell out because a few years back I bought new old stock of Metroid, a brand new sealed copy of the disk system game, and it was pretty cheap, like 50 bucks. So, you know, there's stock still lingering, or, you know, as of 10 years ago, was still lingering in a box someplace, but mini boxes, probably, warehouse is full of it.

So it's successful, but not a huge hit. Yeah, yeah, like in the U.S., it seemed like Nintendo Power played a major role in promoting the game. Because, like, the game had been out already for a few years, I think, by the time Nintendo Power was launched. But those people, Nintendo Power loved this game and seemed like they tried to promote it wherever they could. And it was like you'd see it in the, they had these little ranking things of like ranking, they, They had the readers chart and the, like, pros chart and the retailers chart and the pros at Nintendo Power always, you know, for months and months, were like, yeah, Metroid, like, ranking that up there. Yeah, so the timeline on this, I was there. I remember back in the olden days.

You know, Metroid came out here in 87, and that was around the time that the Fun Club newsletter debuted. this game shipped in the U.S. pretty much at the same time as Zelda and Kidacurus, as kind of like this second wave of NES games from Nintendo that kind of push the boundaries of the tech, and they all had the ability to save either with a battery or a password. So it felt like kind of, you know, this is second generation NES hardware or software. And around the same time, the Fun Club newsletter launched. And, you know, the Nintendo Power showed up a year later. And Metroid certainly was represented heavily in there.

Before that, you had the official Nintendo Players Guide, which had like full maps of Metroid. And a bunch of maps of Zelda, too, which wouldn't show up for like a full year after the players guide showed up, thanks to the chip shortages. But I think Nintendo Power featured Metroid pretty heavily, not only because, you know, the pros liked it, but I think also a lot of the content that they included. for Metroid in Nintendo Power was to address the fact that they were getting a lot of calls about the game. A lot of material in Nintendo Power was reactive. This is what people are interested in and what, you know, we're getting calls about. And the goal of Nintendo Power was, one, to sell games, but two, to help kids, I mean, this was something Gil Tilden talked about last year in her presentation at, you know, with a video game history foundation.

And also with us. She said, you know, they wanted to help kind of give a leg up to kids. So they would buy games and not be frustrated and just stop playing them. Like they were, Nintendo Power was there to help guide players through the games that were confusing. Because, you know, a game like Metroid was really pretty confusing. It was very different and demanding. in a way that you had not seen in console games to that point. Certainly there were difficult, abstract maze-like games before that, like E.T. and Indiana Jones and Sword Quest and things like

that on Atari 2,600. But, you know, Metroid did have a different, I think different expectations came hand in hand with it because it was kind of, you know, post-Super Mario Brothers, as you said. So, you know, people interacted with games differently. There was a higher fidelity. to the graphics and, you know, faster animation and just felt more solid than what you saw with 2600 where, you know, it had like three moving objects on screen. So anything more than that, you had to flicker a lot and create this kind of ghostly experience for people, as in Pac-Man. So, yeah, I think, I think Nintendo Power was kind of addressing head on the fact that a lot of people were buying Metroid, like, certainly I bought it as my first NES game because it looked

really cool. It was in a silver box, not a black box. That's so awesome. So I had to have it, and I heard people talking about how interesting it was, and it just sounded intriguing and mysterious. And it really was intriguing and mysterious in a way that I found difficult to comprehend it first. It was so much less straightforward than Super Mario Brothers. So, yeah, I think I think Nintendo Power kind of reflects the fact that Metroid did have a lot of uptake by NES owners. And they sort of jumped on that and said, here's what you need to do to get X thing or Y thing, but also to kind of say, hey, keep buying this game because it's so cool, you want to play it. So it was kind of a like an ecosystem that really, like that was a great case of what Nintendo Power could do for both readers and also for Nintendo, like, you know, a rising tide with many ships being lifted, I would say. So what you're saying is that if Metroid had shipped in a black box, reality would have been altered.

Your first thing, what would have been? I would have played it at a friend's house and been like, oh, this is. This is cool. I got to play this. Eventually I would have come around to Metroid. But yes, the Silver Box. No, the Silver Box wasn't the only reason I bought the game. Like I'd heard people talking about how interesting it was and about like how scary the actual

Metroids were and fighting bosses and, you know, just like all these things I'd never heard about in a video game before. Like the idea of a boss wasn't really a thing. Like, you know, Sororriory Brothers had Bowser at the end, but I don't think anyone called him the boss. You got to fight Bowser when you get to the end. No, actually, they said mini bosses. That was the thing that really threw me.

I was like, what is a mini boss? Like, is this, the vision I had in my brain was like mobsters, like some guy in a pinstripe suit or something. And I still think Crayed would actually look pretty good in a pinstripe suit. He's got that kind of like, you know, bulky, a little bit gone to seed look to him, but also very powerful. Like, that is your sort of classic middle-aged gangster boss. Like, I think it works. Can't wait. I can't wait to see what this idol speculation results in once people start hearing this and saying,

hmm, I could draw a crate suit. Well, you know, in Super Metroid, he's like launching spikes out of his belly. But what if that were a Tommy gun? See, I just, I think, like, you have to shoot him in the bout and ear. He's got a little red carnation on his lapel. And that's his weak point. This sounds like the perfect computer. Panion piece of fan art to the Zoot Suit Samus.

Yes. Maybe that was part of it, too. I saw that Zoot Suit Samus. Wasn't there a Zoot Suitsumis in Nintendo Power? I'm thinking that there was. I don't think there was. There should have been. Okay, well, I'm getting senile and conflating things.

This is the downside to mastering puns as that your memory rapidly starts to fail. Anyway, so please, tell us what's so interesting about Metro. We've talked a little bit about it. it. But what is it about this game that actually stuck with people and resonated beyond it having a silver box and no guys in pinstripe suits with Tommy guns? I mean, the big thing is it brought platform adventures from home computers to the family computer. Diamond, do you have any thoughts? Well, I think for me it was just, it was one of the very early games on the console that seemed a little...

It's not a horror game, but it has some spookiness to it. You know, you're clearly a person in deep space and a planet where you don't belong, and everything is dark because you're always underground. You know, it feels, it feels and looks very different than the other Nintendo games that came out with the console in those early days, you know, I'm sure. And while I recognize that Japan had a huge variety of software, but a lot of that stuff we just didn't get either in a timely fashion or at all. So, you know, Dragon Quest beat Metroid out in Japan by like three months, but we didn't

see Dragon Warrior until 89. So, yeah, for a kid, I think on this early system, after you had already played Super Mario Brothers or Gyromite, you're looking, oh, what's this? What's this? It's dark, and there's monsters everywhere, and I don't know where I'm supposed to go. part of the fun, quote unquote, is finding out where the hell all this leads you to. And you have to either draw your own map or buy Nintendo publications to get hints. And that's a lot compared to everything else where it's like, just go, just go.

Just clear this level, clear this one stage, run from left to right, and you win. Well, so in terms of the gameplay, you know, so it's bringing platform adventures from home computers to the family comm. And, like, in Japan, FAMICOM players might have been aware that, like, oh, yeah, there's kind of computer games that are complex like this. In the U.S., we didn't really see so many of the computer, like, the platform adventures. They were happening everywhere in the U.K. They were happening to, you know, some degree in Japan. In the U.S., we saw very few of them. And a lot of kids who played the Nintendo, you know, computers were so expensive.

Like there were so many kids who probably didn't see computer games at all, but they had a Nintendo game. They saw Nintendo games. And like this and Zelda were just like this super complex form of Nintendo game that would have been new to kids at the time. But still arriving with that sort of console, sort of. of friendliness and welcoming, you know, because I've certainly, I had my share of computer games in the mid-80s, and some of them, in some cases, the complexity was a strength. But in other games where it was like trying to run around and explore space, you'd get caught up on, oh, how many buttons do I need to press in this thing?

Wait, where am I going again? Wait, can this game be beaten? You know, because we talked about some of the precursors last time, and a lot of those games are fascinating, but also pretty instantly headache-inducing. And Metroid, while it still has an air of mystery and, as I would argue, sort of danger, is still like, oh, I'm running, I'm jumping, I'm shooting. This is all incredibly responsive, incredibly straightforward. I just have to figure out what the hell I do with these powers and energy and how do I get more powers

and how do I get more energy and where are these mini bosses? Where can I find them? Yeah, you know, I think most, a lot of American households had access to home computers by this point. You know, the Apple 2, the Atari, 8-bit family, the 664, were all pretty affordable. So there was a lot of exposure to computers. But, yeah, I just feel like in America, game developers were not engaging with a sort of hybrid action adventure RPG style of game design. Like you saw role-playing games and adventure games and arcade-style games on these computers. But I feel like they did not often sort of cross over.

They were pretty much siloed, much more so than you saw in British microcomputers and Japan-only computers like the PC88. People were taking technology that was really not suited to action experiences and saying, well, this isn't going to be a great arcade experience. But maybe we kind of slow it down and make it more complicated. and then people have something different to chew on than just, you know, trying to have a great Pac-Man experience on something that has a, you know, 12 frames per second refresh rate. So, yeah, I think, I think it was something new and different. Certainly for me it was. But, you know, I didn't have a lot of experience with home computers because I just had to make do with what I saw at my friend's houses or at school and, you know, trying to get video game. time on a school computer was very challenging. The teachers did not, did not approve of that.

So NES was kind of like a, not a revelation for me, but yeah, it kind of was. Like, Metroid, you know, it was a great way to start my NES career was to jump right into that game from buying a system and saying, what in God's name is this? What is happening? Why can't I get anywhere? So another thing that makes this game so unique is the end. Like, I want to ask you, Jeremy, do you remember the moment that you discovered Samus as a girl? I don't. So, you know, this was not an era in which you were like, no spoilers, please.

Like, people were talking pretty freely about, you know, how to beat games and what happens when you beat the games. Like, you know, Metroid had a remarkably textual and dense ending for a video game of that era. actually like had three entire sentences of text. That's crazy. That's so luxurious, so literate. So I don't remember exactly that they might have shown it in Fun Club news, actually. If I'm remembering right, and I'm probably not. I don't think they did because I was digging through there and could not find any evidence other than one piece of fan art, like an envelope fan art, somebody sent in that even that was ambiguous. Yeah, she kind of looks like David Bowie in that one. Very, like, very, you know, hair metal of the 80s look to her. I don't, I don't remember,

but I also, I thought it was cool. You know, once I unlocked the, I guess you can call it zero suit now, but just armorless Samus, where she's running around in a leotard. I'm like, it's so cool that I'm just like a person now and not a robot. I like that. But it also didn't strike me as being some sort of wild out-of-place revelation that a girl can be a hero, because you know, I watched a lot of G.I. Joe and stuff. And one of my favorite stats about the G.I. Joe cartoon is that the characters with the most dialogue are Cobra Commander, Scarlet, or no, sorry, Lady J. and the Baroness. So three, two of the top three most visible and active characters in the show are women. So, you know, to me it was just like.

you know, Princess Leia is out there. She's the one who killed Jabba. You know, the ladies are cool and tough, and they can fight just as well as boys. So, yeah, I don't, I don't remember, like, having this kind of, wow, come to Jesus sort of moment about Sammas' identity. I just thought it was neat. I think for me, I would have come across it probably as part of, like, passwords that got passed around that lets you just see Sammis without armor. And I don't know how. long it took me to discover that, oh, no, if you beat the game fast enough, Sammis will just disrobe and show you herself in the ending. So I think it was probably more like a mix of, oh, here's the game, and it's cool when you're running and jumping. Oh, but if you put in a special password, you can fight without any armor on. And then at some point, like, oh, well, if you beat the if you just beat the game, if you just beat the game normally, you can just do that. But you be very good at the game. Well, I'm not very good at this game, but I'll keep playing it. Yeah, that was a really, actually that was a really great replay incentive back in the day when, you know, I had one game, um, was to continue playing Metroid and, you know, iterating on that password. Because once you beat the game, you can restart and you carry forward some of your abilities. So the first time I beat it, my time on the clock if it had been shown, which it didn't. But, um, it would have been like 50 or 60 hours, I'm sure. Because I just sat around like, what do I do? Where do I go? I have to bomb out.

everything. But the second time I beat it, I did get Samus to take off her helmet. And I was like, you know, I can, I can do this. I can get the best ending. So eventually I did get the best ending. And then it became a question of like, well, what happens if I beat the game and I don't get, you know, certain power-ups? Like, Samus changes, her armor changes color when you get the Varya. So what happens if you get the, don't get the Varya and then beat the game and get the best time? Like, what happens to Samis's appearance? And it turned out she's naturally a brunette, not a green-haired lady. So, you know, it was, it was like these challenges that kind of popped up sort of organically from trying to see how quickly you could beat the game. Kid Acres did that too, but I think in a

less interesting way, it's not like you could play as, you know, like the girl version of pit or something or, you know, pit in armor. Like, you can't be Centurion Pit with the best endings, like, beefy upgrade in the armor. Like, you never got to do that. So Metroid was kind of, um, one of original speed run games to really like, you know, what happens if you can beat it in a certain amount of time and create these, you know, new conditions for a win that alter kind of the, what you see on the screen and the experience you have. So that was, that was something that was not obvious when I bought the game, but the longer I played it, the more I was like, oh, this is, you know, I can do stuff here. I can try to test my abilities and, you know, see what the outcomes

are. And then there were the unintended effects that the developers didn't even mean to put in there, like the wall jumping thing where you could climb up the wall and interspaces that are like zeroed out in code and not meant to be accessible. Like, you know, Nintendo Power even told you how to do that. So they kind of jumped on it and were like, hey, here's something that's, you know, it's a mystery. Who knows what's out there? No one. But, you know, they encourage kids to kind of just like play around and basically try to break the game. And we'll talk about that when we get to Axiom Verge because that was very much the experience that Thomas Happ was trying to bring to his game was like the mystery of this new NES game doing all kinds of things that are so

sophisticated and complicated that it sort of breaks the code and gives you this playground of glitches and errors to mess around in. That was that was fun and unique. And, uh, at the same time, you know, didn't damage your system the way some glitches and exploits could. Yeah, I, uh, I had the ending spoiled for me because I didn't, uh, I didn't come to Metroid until I super Metroid. Uh, and actually my introduction to the character was in Nintendo Power. Like, uh, growing up, I didn't have a subscription in Nintendo Power. So I was, had no awareness of, of Metroid until I was, uh, had no awareness of Metroid until I was,

reading a copy of like a cousin's issue of Nintendo Power that had this comic. It had this comic called Super Metroid. And I'm like, oh, this is really cool, like dark sci-fi woman. I like this. I don't know what this is. And then a while later, one of my brothers borrowed Super Metroid from a friend. And it took a moment for me to go, like for it to connect with me that would, oh, this is the comic that I write. I like this.

And so, like, the ending in a roundabout way created this legacy where Samus has sometimes been called, like, the first female protagonist in video games, which isn't true. She's not even really the first Nintendo one, depending on how you qualify that. But it created this legacy where she is the first Nintendo character to lead a series of games. Like she is Nintendo's one, like, franchise woman, basically. Like, the other women who have started to get their own series, like Peach, you know, she came out of the Mario series. But Sammas comes right from her own series, you know. Well, there's always Martha from Fire Emblem.

I hear about Martha a lot. That was a joke, sorry. Okay. I didn't mean to interrupt with my bad dad jokes. I'm not even a dad. What's going on? Oh, no. It wasn't an interruption because I'd sort of completed the thought.

Okay. Like, I have all these notes about, like, oh, what are Nintendo's other early female protagonists? But, like, I don't know. Do we really want to get into that? Not really. I mean, we've talked. about Clu-Clu-Land. There's not that much to say about it. It's just Pac-Man, but you're revealing

smiley faces made out of gyms instead of eating dots. Yeah, and that character was only female in the U.S. In the original Japanese version, the character has no gender. So kind of like Berto. And then there's Mock Rider who is like, maybe, maybe not like the first Samis reveal because in the versus version of the game there are these screens that unlock as you play the game

and kind of suggest that maybe Mock Rider is a woman, which then when the game Captain Rainbow was being developed, they almost made that canon. Like Mock Rider has a model that exists in the code, but didn't get far enough to like getting finished and having that character as one of the characters in the game. But would have been a woman, just like Sammas.

Yeah, and, you know, the whole thing with Sammas' identity and the tone of Metroid in general, Diamond, you mentioned the horror quality to it. It definitely had an atmosphere that you did not see in console games at the time, not only the pacing, but also the music, which was original and extremely well composed, which was, and it wasn't like super happy Calliope music like Mario. So that was, you know, it was really different. But, you know, the game was sort of channeling a lot of trends and just tendencies that you saw in media at the time, especially Japanese sort of pop culture media. And we've talked about this, what was it last year?

Probably two or three years ago. I can't remember. Time has no meaning anymore. in an episode called Bikini Warriors that was just talking about like basically the trend of making women, the lead protagonists of Japanese cartoons, games, etc., often not really dressed for the role of combat, but nevertheless out there being women, killing stuff with weapons, being cool, and often just wearing a bikini. So Sam has kind of tapped into that a bit. The revelation of, wow, the pilot is a lady. You saw that a lot in games around this time. Like the Famicom version of Salamander, the Japanese version of Life Force, I believe that has ending screens that were not present in the U.S. version due to memory limitations.

And one of those revelations is that the pilot of the Vic Viper or the Road British is a woman. You had things like, we'll talk about this later, the Guardian Legend, where you are a spaceship that is also a girl, which is a really cool idea. I think more spaceships should also be girls. But, you know, that probably comes a bit from like Zeta Gundam, where you had some of the new types who could pilot like the giant Gundam that hovers over the city as a big, psychic controlled machine. You started seeing more female characters kind of put into this combat role as opposed to just being like the support role sitting at the computer, calling out anxiously to the heroic men that were going to save the day. So there was this kind of trend of shifting the role of gender and fictional characters in anime, manga, comics, games.

games, et cetera. And Samus, you know, feels very much a part of that where it's kind of like, oh, you thought she was a boy, but it was her, Samus. So yeah, I feel like she was very kind of untrend for the time and kind of planted a bit of a flag for Nintendo in a sort of pop culture space. So any other thoughts on the original Metroid before we move on to the after party? just really, I really enjoy this game. And I can't, I can't imagine what not playing it would have done to me, if that makes sense. It makes perfect sense because I feel like, you know, like I talked about last week at

Long Island Retro Expo, I feel like this game did things to my brain and not in a, like, weird, creepy way, just like, you know, opening the third eye kind of way. Like, oh, video games can be this. This is my personality. This is what I love. Which is how I felt about Super Metroid when I played that. Like, you can go left. Sometimes you have to go left.

And that's probably one of those things that they added during the refinement process of getting Metroid over the finish line. It feels very much, you know, that opening area where you have to eventually go left to get the Mar-O-Marie. so you can roll into a ball. That feels very much like it was kind of taken from the same sort of playbook as World 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers, World 1-2, which, you know, those early levels were added late in development to the game. So they could say, well, maybe people need to understand how you can play this and we should sort of ease them in and give them little guys that you can jump on once to kill,

as opposed to guys you have to jump on multiple times or can't jump on a at all. It just feels like that's sort of like, hey, what if the user experience were good and kind of guided the player in subtle ways was very much something Nintendo helped pioneer in video games and probably came about from the fact that they could actually spend 13 months developing a game in an era where the average development time on a game was like six to eight weeks. So, you know, you look over at the Sega Master System, and there's some really good games on there, but the really great games on Master System are so good that it makes you frustrated by the fact that Sega very infamously had extremely short development times, extremely small development

teams for their home software, because, you know, they were really talented. The hardware was really good. And they could have done more things that had the impact of a Metroid or a Zelda. But the resources, the time, the budget, the staffing just weren't there. The way that Nintendo kind of luxuriated in the fact that it had, you know, honestly, I think third parties kind of forcing their way onto the Famicom, not really Nintendo's game plan for that system. But I feel like when Namcoe and Hudson were just kind of like shoveled their way. way in and said, ah, you know what, we're going to publish games here. We can do it. That was maybe the best thing that ever happened to Nintendo because all of a sudden they had this licensing

system where people were buying consoles and people were buying games that the developers or the publishers had to, you know, pay them for to manufacture. And so all of a sudden, Nintendo had this kind of passive revenue stream that was bringing in tons of money. And it meant that when they wanted to make games themselves, they didn't have to, you know, maintain that Sega schedule of just churning out dozens of games a year to make their system look viable. They could, you know, release three, four, four, five games a year and put different teams on them and let those teams just really sink their teeth into the project and spend as long as they needed to refine and improve them. And they still do that. Like, their games are in development for ages.

And, you know, that's not uncommon in AAA games, but there is a different feeling about it with Nintendo, which is not so much like, we don't understand this technology. This has gotten beyond our scope. We're spending a billion dollars on this game. It's more like, well, we have some really great stuff here. But what if we just kind of hit the brakes and take the time to really polish it up and we'll put it out when it's ready? I feel like Metroid is kind of one of the first examples of this sort of. of divide between Nintendo and the rest of the industry where they take the, they benefit from a third-party licensing system.

But instead of just, you know, bringing value to the shareholders, they invest it back into their core business and make their core business better. So people continue buying Nintendo systems just to get those first party games. I have a silly question. Mm-hmm. What do we think is the lesson impartage of the players? by having so many of the Metroid enemies, especially the early enemies, be little ground-based creatures that can crawl on any surface, but you can't hit them unless you're at a different

level. Like, you know, if you and a creature crawling on the ground meet on a plat plane, initial stamenis can do nothing, but jump and avoid them. And it takes later on when you have the sort of different levels, when you're in one of those column areas, or when you eventually get the bombs or, or wave beam, that way you can just shoot them standing up. But for the initial stretch of the game, you have to sort of get around the enemies. And I wonder, is that an educational choice?

What do you think? I think that that was intentionally done to create, like, a limitation that you overcome by getting an upgrade, similar to how Samus's initial, you know, shot has a shorter range, like way shorter than you would expect from a gain. But they clearly put that in as an artificial limitation so that you'd have to get the long beam and like, oh, look, you just got something. Now you're rewarded. So I think that's what was going on.

I think that is a very good observation. Thank you. And it is also a very good design approach. And it is something that I straight up stole when I worked on Jaws Enhanced Edition. I limited what you can do in the boat just so that there could be power-ups to collect so you would feel like, oh, I'm advancing. I'm becoming more powerful. I think that's a great way to pull the player in very easily is kind of artificially, but not in a game-breaking way. Hinder them, limit what they can do.

And then, you know, when you give them the thing that should kind of be the base level of their abilities, they're like, ah, yes, this is this is the stuff. Now I can kill things with impunity. I will say that in the opening space, like the very first room of Metroid before you go through the first door, there are enemies, I believe they are called zoomers. Do not kill zoomers. We are not recommending the wanton destruction of people younger than ourselves. They're the future. There are zoomers on the ceiling, on walls, on those those. two rock faces that where you begin, there's little guys moving around that. So you do face them and

you, you know, it teaches you right away like, I either need to jump over these things or run away from them or I can aim up and I can shoot up instead of just forward or I can wait until they come into range and shoot them. So yeah, it's, you know, a very teachable moment right there. And when you do get the screw attack and before that when you get the bombs, it does feel empowering because all of a sudden, you know, you can just basically lay mines for these little guys and they'll walk right into them and explode. And that's very satisfying. And also in the second or third room, the big bug-looking, like cicada-looking guys who zoom, like swoop down and take a lot of shots to hit and are very difficult to kill before you get those upgrades. You know,

if you don't have the wave beam or something, it's, tough to take them out before they plow into you because they hover along the ground and smash into your feet. You know, once you get the bombs and you can start, like, just laying down a trail of bombs for them to fly into, that feels really good, too. And also, the sound effects are really satisfying when an Emmy explodes on a bomb, both in the NES and Famicom versions, although they have different sound effects. They're both, like, very gratifying.

Like, oh, yeah, I just, I messed up that guy's day. it feels pretty good. So, okay, final thoughts on Metroid. Very exciting. A game that teaches you things, even if you're not aware of it. That's the best kind of lesson, a subtle one. So I want to talk about the successors to Metroid. We talked about predecessors last time,

but successors is something we haven't actually talked excessively about on retro-nounce before. So this is relatively fresh territory. There's both the, the successors at Nintendo within their own stable of games, and also the successors outside of Nintendo, where

other people looked at Nintendo's games and said, man, that's so good, let's do that. And Metroid has been, as with so many great games, people have just looked at it and said, I'm going to lift this element wholesale because it rules, and the result is a game that is extremely good and

satisfying because they, you know, intuitive, like, here's some great design, ideas and other people said those were great design ideas and I want those too. So let's talk about, you know, there's the Metroid series, but okay, we've talked about those. What are some other games at Nintendo, like from the Nintendo stable, that have taken elements of Metroid, some concepts like the gating or the power-ups or whatever and said, yeah, okay, let's do that. A big one that jumped out to me when I was playing Super Nintendo back in the day was,

was playing Kirby Superstar and the Great Cave Offensive and Milky Way wishes had, had, you know, elements of that that were like, oh, this feels kind of familiar. And then later, those kind of elements pop up in the Amazing Mirror. Yeah, the Amazing Mirror is interesting. Actually, all the Kirby games are interesting because they're not fully full-on Metroidvania. Oh, I said it. First time this actually shown up in this episode. We've been remarkably restrained. It took us more than an hour to get to the word.

It's my fault. Sorry about that. I did invent the word, though, so I guess it's okay. I said it earlier. I snuck it in it. Oh, did you? Yeah. I guess my brain filter. I just heard Lolli Lule Lo, Lowe, sorry.

So the thing about Kirby is that you don't get permanent power-ups. I don't think there are any Kirby games where Kirby is like he gets a power. and that's him from then on. He always has temporary power-ups, and if you wander into an enemy or something, you'll lose that power-up. And so there's a temporary quality to Kirby's enhanced abilities, which almost makes the game more like a puzzle game

when it goes kind of exploratory. Like, the amazing mirror was really interesting because not only did it have ability-based gating that transpired, you know, stretched across multiple levels where you'd have to go to one level, get an ability, then take it to another level to be able to use it to break a barrier, which, you know, Kirby's Adventure did a little bit of that, but it was linear. Whereas this is, you know, the amazing mirror was just a full-on multiplayer map. And that's the thing. It was a multiplayer. Like, it had an open map where players could team up and collaborate. They were working independently,

but you could coordinate with people and say, oh, I'm going to this place. Can you open up this barrier for me? I'm going to take a different power up in there. So it was kind of exercising the Metroidvania brain, not the Metroidbraania, just the Metroidvania brain in a different way than was, I think maybe had ever been seen before. Like coordinating with another person in sort of an independent play space that was nevertheless sort of mutually shared is a really great idea. And I haven't really seen a lot of games that do that, probably because it's very complicated.

Like there's a little bit of that in Castlevania harmony of despair. But, you know, even that's not properly Metroidvania, despite being just avania. It is avania. But, you know, all the levels are sort of self-contained experiences that take about 20 minutes to complete. So there's running around sort of free-form exploration, but within the boundaries of of a single stage. So, yeah, Kirby, Amazing Mirror, very different and very interesting and needs to be ripped off more, I think, Diamond.

What do we think they learned from Metroid in making Mario Brothers 3? Do we think there's any seeds there? Because obviously, there's no such thing as permanent power-ups for Mario. But what about you've made a Mario sequel now? It's like, okay, well, you still have to do all the stuff. You still have to find all the secrets. but now we're going to let you collect some of these secrets, and you can have them in your bag,

and then you can sort of figure out, okay, what happens if I go to this space as a frog? What happens if I go to this base with a tail that I can fly? What if? What if? No? I think it's so hard to say because the bar along the bottom that you see, like, from what I remember correctly, isn't there a bar on the overhead map view

that shows everything, you've collected, and that bar along the bottom reminds me so much of the bar in Tower of Drouaga that shows you what items you've collected. So it's like, it's hard to say, like, is it a Metroid thing, or is it like a Drouaga kind of influence? So here's the thing. It's probably all the above. It's probably, you know, lessons learned internally at Nintendo by making these, you know,

a game like Metroid, but also taking influences from other. other people's work. And, you know, Zelda is kind of Nintendo's answer to Druaga in a lot of ways. So, yeah, I think, I think it's all the above to a certain degree. I, you know, I've talked about this, but I kind of see Super Mario Brothers 3 is the death of the Metroidvania for a long time. That, that genre just kind of went away aside from like Metroid sequels and the occasional little, hey, it's me, Kirby, with a power up. And I think that's because, you know, the idea of big adventures, of exploration, of power-ups and things like that in a platform action game was very popular and something that developers really liked. But then Nintendo came along and made a game that played like, you know, classic Mario, but also had those elements without it taking over the entire game.

You know, it was basically like in the sort of classic, I would say Mario, Miyamoto, Tesika way. sort of a playground to goof around and try different things, experiment with different things, and see what you could do and come up with. And so it sort of had a conversation with Metroid but said, you know what, this isn't really the thing that Mario should be. However, we can bring little bits of it in there. We can bring little bits of the action RPG in there. We can make the, you know, like lock things off so you can only get them by having a certain

ability. And that was always kind of baked into Mario just with the super mushroom. Like, you needed the super mushroom to be able to get certain power-ups or to access, you know, World 8 or sorry, 4-2's warp zone by breaking bricks and revealing bricks. And, you know, you had to be able to break things away. So yeah, I feel like it's, you know, just this continuing evolution and taking influences from a lot of places. And I do feel, you know, having sort of Metroid in their own stable of works was certainly informed some things in Super Mario Brothers 3. But as Kate said, I think there's also, there's more happening there. Yeah, the more I think about it, I feel like, I feel like Super Mario 3 isn't taking any direct

influence from Metroid so much as. as it's sharing maybe a lot of influences that had, you know, similar design philosophy, similar bits that might have influenced Metroid. Like the world map itself where you're suddenly going like, oh, now it's not a linear, like everything is just one, one, one, two, everything's forward, unless you work, right? Like, now you have like some options of like which way you're going to go. maybe you go back on the World Web. And that felt like the world map thing feels like it's probably taking influence from

Dragonbuster, which might have in turn had some influence on Metroid. And also kind of from board games. What is that genre called Sugoroku? That's just inescapable in Japanese games. I feel like, you know, there's a lot of different things kind of at play in Super Bowl Brothers 3. I do think that when Super Mario World came along, that is a much more concrete example of not necessarily Metroid specifically, but the Metroid mindset where there are permanent changes affected on the world map. And the world map is not something where you finish world one and you never see world one again.

Like you can go back and forth across the entire Super Mario World World map. There are branching paths and hidden alternate exits and, you know, things that you can only act. if you turn on switches at the four switch palaces. And so you are making global changes that are persistent and permanent in the world. And to me, that is much more of a Metroid-type thing. Although, again, you know, this was a game designed by the people who made Zelda. So that's probably the inflection point. But nevertheless, there's a lot of.

similar design thinking and language between Metroid and Zelda. So who can say? And just think, when you start the games at Mario World, you have a choice to go left or right. That's true. Yeah. It's true. And there's eggs so you don't turn into a little ball, but you get a little ball that turns into a little guy who's your friend and you run around and feed him fruit. And then it becomes a big friend. You give him a ride. Then he gives you a ride. It's like a mutual. Mutualism there. Anyway, yeah, so Super Mario World, you know, Chris Sims has been on the podcast many times and likes to antagonize us about how Super Mario World is a, is a Metroidvania, and it's not. But nevertheless, I appreciate the spirit in which he says that because there are, there are some thoughts there. I would feel the closest that the Mario games have really come to Metroidvania is the Wario Land spinoffs, especially. Wario land two and three. Although again, those kind of do the Kirby thing where Wario's power-ups or power downs, his status elements are sometimes required to access places. They're not permanent. So Mario never becomes more powerful. He just becomes wealthier and angrier and probably smellier. So, you know, it's kind of in that same design set as mine design mindset. as Kirby. But, you know, those games with their very slow-paced levels that are very much about

breaking walls and trying to see what you can get away with. And there is an enemy who turns you into a ball and dunks you into a basket to play basketball with you. So it's kind of like a Mar-O-Mari. Yeah, like it's got a, it's got a Metroid mindset. And I don't think that's coincidental because that was, you know, the Wario games were designed by Nintendo R&D1, and Kiyotaki was the designer of Wario and had a big role in the Wario Land games. So, yeah, that's, that's to me, kind of where you see Metroid manifesting in the Mario series, most of all. I wrote a note here that Mario Wonder also kind of reminds me of that, but now I can't remember specific examples because it's been too long since I pleaded.

Yeah, I played a few worlds of that, and I did not get Metroid vibes. I would be curious to hear more about this. I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Maybe I need to play it again and remind myself. It was something about the power. Like, there are certain power-ups, I feel like, that let you access areas of the levels

that you couldn't previously. But then, yeah, I don't know, man. It's been too long. that that game has been replaced in my memory with other games. You know, we already have the S-A-X evil goopi Samus, but I wonder what would a, what would a Wario Samus look like? A Wario Samus? A Wemmus.

So are you saying, because you're saying we already have kind of the evil version, evil doppelganger Sammas? Are you saying? But that's a very specific monster, that's a monstrous version based on Samus, as opposed to a rival, a rival that Samus can have who also perhaps has other friends they hang out with and they all love to dress in opposite colors. You know, like, did they ever put, you know, we got obviously, we need tennis in here. Obviously, we have to work tennis into this somehow or baseball. There's the Mar-O-Mari, so. So we haven't seen what's under Silux's mask yet.

It's Sammas with a big, pointy mustache and a big purple nose. Oh, man. I hope everything we talked about gets drawn up by our returans fans somehow. I hope this happens. We need an envelope art section. I should share our corporate mailing address, which is just a post office box. It's a nice safe destination. People can send us envelopes.

It'll be great. Yeah. So, anyway. Can I mention just one more Nintendo franchise, though, that might take influence from Metroid. Because this is knowledge that horrified me when somebody pointed it out. Because I was talking with some people, when I was trying to flesh out my personal definition for how I would define a Metroidvania, and I was trying it out on people and getting feedback and trying to figure out if Zelda counts or not. You know, maybe some of the games count.

Some of them don't. Hard to say. But when I was working it out, somebody said, well, what about Pokemon? And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean? And they're like, well, there's certain Pokemon that you collect that give you abilities that you are required to use to get past obstacles in the world now. So that's the dual purpose thing that I, like,

make a big part of my personal definition, you know? So they're like, well, there you go, like dual purpose abilities to get past these obstacles. So are there, are there Pokemon that have those abilities? I thought those were TMs that you attached to a Pokemon. Yeah, I think that's what it is. I have not actually played through the OG Pokemon game. So I see. I had to go and watch a play through and go, are you serious? Is this a real thing? Um, but yeah. Um, I would say that is, the gating there is just, you know, classic RPG. Like, it's, you know, getting surf is kind of like getting the boat in Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Like, finally, you can access water.

It's just you have to tie it to a specific Pokemon. And, you know, it is common for people to have a single Pokemon that they sync all their teams to so they don't have to waste those abilities in combat because they're not actually that useful. for the most part. So they have just like the sixth little guy who tags along with them when they need to go surfing or break rocks or whatever. So what I, the conclusion I personally came to is that like when you play Call of Duty,

it has a whole XP thing, but we don't consider Call of Duty an RPG. And I think that's because they're, like in any game, when you're looking at games, play genre, there is the primary objective, and then there might be elements from other types of games. So Call of Duty, it has RPG elements in the form of the XP thing, but it's ultimately a first-person shooters. So I view Pokemon as an RPG that has some minor Metroidvania elements, and that might be the best way to, you know, the Zelda's might be action adventures that have

Metroidvania elements. Yeah, I mean, I parse those as precursors because those ideas were around before Metroid. So, yeah, you'll make some people angry if you say things like that. And that's fine with me. Some people need to be angry. But, yeah, like, it's just, you know, they're all drawing from the same design language and expressing it in different ways. the action RPG, the role-playing game, the platform adventure, or the first-person adventure, as in the case of Metroid Prime, which is an FPS, but also is a Metroidvania as opposed

to Call of Duty. Okay, so anyway, those are the Nintendo things. There was something I was going to say. I can't remember what it was, so it probably wasn't any good. So let's move along and talk about some other games, not by Nintendo, that do the Metroid thing. And there's one in here I've never heard of, so I need to hear about this. Oh, are you talking about cross-blame? Cross-Blaim? Yes, I am not talking about Castlevania Symphony the Night.

That's good. I would be right. So Cross-Blaim is this computer game in Japan that I think might be the first Japanese game to take direct influence from Metroid. And I say this because ads for the game like it was not in common for some Japanese computer game companies to put out ads before the game was finished in order to start

drumming up hype and stuff like that and a lot of times they it was companies who thought that the game was further along than it was or thought that it would be finished up faster than it was cross-blame

the ads started running before the game was anywhere near ready. And it was a very different looking game. And then like at one, like the ad stopped and then the ad started again. And now it looked like more of a Metroid-y kind of, now I'm blanking on the game, the name of that game where there's another Japanese computer game that looked Metroid-E that was a robot, where you're shooting walls. Are we talking about relics on Koko Yosai? Oh, no.

No? No, I'm, no. I'm talking about this one where you play like as a Mac, kind of, where you're going through these levels that you're shooting walls and stuff. And origin online, like released. Yeah, yeah. Dexter. Okay.

Cross flame looks kind of like this, thextery-ish, Metroid-ish kind of thing. They reworked it, you know, after the release of Metroid. And so I'm like, I think, I think maybe that's what they were looking at. Well, there's also a game from 1986 called Relics, developed by Bothtech, where it feels very Metroid-ish. You are a person stomping around in power armor, and it's got like a very similar aspect, but you have to possess things in the environment to open up passageways. is. And it's a very, apparently it's pretty good in its computer incarnation, which is on

egg console. But I've only played it on disk system, which is god awful because they mismanaged the memory handling. And so, like, every five steps you take, it pauses to load data from the disk system media. And it's, it's terrible. It's pretty much unplayable. But, but, you know, this came out after Metroid and, or maybe around the same time. I don't know the exact. Well, so, like, the computer version of Relics is definitely, you know, better than that Nintendo one. It's a very different game. The Nintendo one is essentially a sequel that is definitely taking some influence from Metroid at that point. The original computer version is like a completely different game for the most part with, like, like they have a.

similar story and a similar core concept, but the level design and the enemies and the powers and things are dramatically pretty different. And relics, the computer game, came out before Metroid. And then this

Nintendo sequel came, or the Famicom sequel came out after Metroid. And I think that one takes influence as well. But that Famicom version also came out after Cross Flame. So that's I think cross-blame kind of got there to the direct inspiration first.

Nice. Okay, so cross-blame. I looked at video footage of it, and it doesn't seem like something I want to go back and play in the year 2026. Would have loved it in 1986, though. I do want to give a shout out to Air Fortress, a game that I feel was very, very heavily influenced by Metroid. It's kind of a scrolling shooter. But then also not. So this was developed by Hal, and I think originally published in 1987 for Famicom, came over here, like two years later, as things so often did.

But you play as a little space person riding a rocket ship and you approach an Air Fortress. That is the name of the thing. And then you enter it. And once you enter it, it goes from being a scrolling shooter to a. sort of simplistic maze kind of thing. And you get very simple power-ups. There are no, like, real permanent progression elements besides your health. But once you defeat the computer core inside each fortress, you then have to escape. So even though it's not Metroidvania in any real sense, it has a little bit of that feel to it. And certainly the, like, blow up the boss thing and

then escape feels very, very Metroid coded. So I feel like, you know, as closely as Hal, as close as Howell's relationship was to Nintendo, it seems very likely to me that, you know, the creators of this game were quite aware of Metroid and said, I like some of that. Let's do some of that. And it's kind of one of those like B-tier cult Nintendo classics. I dated someone back 30 years ago who was like, Air Fortress is my favorite game. And I said, I never even touched that game because the cover and the box art and the screenshots look so uninspiring. And then it turned out to be pretty good. Any thoughts on Air Fortress? I'm unfamiliar with Air Force.

You should try it. It's a charming little game. It's not great. Like I said, B-tier. But it has a little Metroid mojo. I like it. More distinctly, Metroid Mojo, but also Zelda Mojo. You have the Guardian legend for the NES, and this was kind of like Relics, I guess, a sequel to a computer game that was very different. The original Guardian legend, the game before it, Gartick, was an MSX game that was a single-screen shooter, kind of in the Gallagher vein. But then once you cleared a screen, you had the opportunity to go to, you, you know,

choose which screen you wanted to go to next. And so you were kind of working your way through this nonlinear maze, screen by screen, beating different scenarios, different layouts and setups of enemy ships. And it was okay. But then for the sequel, the developers just said, let's go for it. And it was compile. They basically said, let's make a sequel to Golvelius. But in space, and that was a great idea.

So you, it combines, kind of like Air Fortress, it combines linear scrolling shooter with screen-by-screen exploration. It's just that the exploration part is also top-down, like, you know, forced three-quarter perspective Zelda style. But to me, it reads more Metroid because I think one of the defining elements of a Metroid-esque game is that it is not about melee combat. It is about ranged combat. you are someone with a gun who can shoot things from afar. I think that's an important element of saying, this is Metroid style as opposed to this is Castlevania style or Zelda 2 style. So you play as Miria, the aforementioned spaceship who is also a girl,

when you are in the space shooting sequences, obviously you're in ship form, but then you transform into a robot or cyborg woman and travel through the core of this planetoid, this artificial planetoid that's basically unicron rushing toward Earth, I guess, called Naju. And your goal is to basically go into all the shooter corridors, take out the bosses, to unlock new areas in the top-down zones, which are all kind of interconnected and maze-like, gaining new powers, new weapons, permanent upgrades and things like that, and eventually destroying the core of Naju to prevent it from, uh,

destroying Earth or whatever it does. And, you know, it being compile, the shooting bits are pretty frantic and do a lot with the NES hardware that you would not necessarily think is possible. And they do it anyway. But because it does have the sort of Metroid Zelda style progression, you become more powerful as you play through the game. You have permanent upgrades. And you can collect a ton of expendable, like they're called screen erasers. which is kind of the way to just cheese your way through the later parts of the game if you're not a great shooter player. So it kind of balances out the difficulty to accommodate people who are not necessarily Twitch players. So if you're an RPG action RPG fan, it won't necessarily completely kick you out and force you to get good.

And the power-ups you get that you earn actually do have kind of a cross-interchange between the two different styles. of game, which is not something you saw in, say, Blastermaster, where your tank became really cool and Jason on his foot always really sucked. Anyway, Guardian Legend is an awesome game. I someday want to make a sequel to it. God damn it. Oh, that would be great. Any thoughts on Guardian Legend or did I suck the air out of the room?

Well, if we're talking about Guardian Legend, which is a 1988 game or a sequel to 1986 game, then surely we have to at least name drop Castlevania 2. I know it's not a shooter per se, but it's kind of right there, right? Well, that was an 87 game. But I'm saying before we get any further down the road of late 80s, early 90s, we should at least name drop Castlevania, too, because most of us here love it, I hope. Yes, I feel like that was very directly Konami's answer to Zelda 2. Zelda 2 was Nintendo's answer to Dragonbynob.

So it's just, yeah, it's just Konami ripping off Nintendo ripping off Namco, because as we all know, Masanobu, Indo, and Namco are the primal font of all things in video games and the only origin story that truly matters. I haven't played Castlevania 2 personally, but I almost feel like I have because I've watched so many videos about the things that it does that I'm like, oh, yeah, there's the, look. towns and you talk to the people. So I will say, he's been on the show before. He has a guest. The Angry Video Game Nerd's take on Zelda or Castlevania 2 is not correct. So please don't be deterred by those opinions. Right.

All you need is issue two of Nintendo Power and you're good. All right. So, um, let's on the list. Oh, go ahead. I want to bring up a different kind of Metroid influence than we typically, like, So first of all, I want to say I tried so hard to limit the number of games that I wrote in here because I didn't want this to turn into its own whole episode again. But there's one game that as a, Metroid 2, I feel like, may have influenced some games in a different way instead of like the game design component. Just like the environmental storytelling aspect of Metroid 2, I kind of wonder sometimes if other game developers,

picked up on that because like Metroid 2 comes out in like November 1991 and then Ultima Underworld comes out in March 1992 and has some kind of environmental

storytelling type things happening in there and I'm like is that just a coincidence or was somebody on the team maybe they had a game boy they're having fun with it or are there earlier games that did environmental storytelling, then Metroid 2.

I kind of want to make this a call out to the listeners to tell me, tell me any that you can know of or find. What do you mean by environmental storytelling in Ultima underworld? The shells, the multi-shells that would have to remember now. I would have to go back and look. But environmental storytelling, to be clear about what I mean by environmental storytelling, I mean, I don't mean like you walk into a room and there's a sign on the wall or there's scribblings on a wall like telling you like stuff. I'm thinking like you walk into a room and you're seeing the aftermath of something that previously happened.

But it is the room is designed in such a way that you can tell what happened by the aftermath of the room. or there's like a suggestion of like of something was here. I don't know. I don't know if I'm making sense. So I just did a quick search. And on Wikipedia, the last reliable source on the internet, it says that Ultima underworld was in development for nearly two years before it launched. So I feel like anything that happened in that game was very independent of what happened in Metroid 2,

a few months before. But it does kind of go to the idea that there were, you know, ideas just kind of lurking, stewing in the environment that people picked up on. And I feel like you probably saw a lot of environmental storytelling in like point-and-click adventure games, a King's Quest or Monkey Island or something like that. So, you know, Ultima Underworld was very much taking cues from the PC world, PC-R-PGs and adventure games. And, you know, proto-FPS.

S's to a certain degree. So, you know, I think all these things look back to PC RPGs and adventure games. That's, you know, a big influence on games like Metroid and games like Ultima Underworld. That's my thought. Just spitballing here based on a single Wikipedia article. I'm intrigued by this idea, though. I am, now I'm wondering what the history there is. Because I get it when you talk about Metroid 2 and how certain rooms just, they can made a message to you that you're not safe here. Oh, there's a Metroid shell here. Time to brace up.

Find a safe thing. Yeah. And like I don't, I feel like I can't think of any computer RPGs and things before that that did that. But I could be wrong because obviously I have not played every computer RPG. I haven't played most of them. But, uh, that's, no, I was thinking, I was definitely thinking more adventure games than RPGs.

Like, yeah. Yeah. You know, when, when you, when you look at adventure games, like the Lucas film games, uh, adventures and Sierra like those are individually crafted spaces so they put a lot

of artistry and a lot of thoughts and ideas and hints and just you know decor into each of those spaces so right I just feel like

I haven't seen an example in any of those games that felt like environmental storytelling so much as like you know they do a good job of creating a space that looks lived in

see if Stuart were here he could tell us how Dizzy pioneered environment. Damn it. So I'm just putting that out there for Stewart's sake. It was Dizzy. Dizzy invented it. But no, it is interesting to see kind of how these things sort of bubble to the surface

around the same time coming from like wildly different sources of inspiration being created by totally disconnected teams on opposite sides of the world. I love that thing of, you know, that element of video games. It just feels very organic and very much like, you know, people were looking at what technology could do and where games had been and saying, what next? What can we do now? Where can we push this? And that's what makes game history so exciting to me is just like seeing all these people trying, you know, pushing the boundaries and often failing and doing horrible things, but with good intentions. So moving on to something that is not horrible and definitely created with.

the best of intentions. The, uh, the Metroid-style game, you know, the, the Metroidvania, if we all kind of took a break for most of the 90s. It was, you know, like I said, Super Mario Brothers 3 just did the, did the Dracula steak thing right in the chest. Um, but then Shaft came along and brought Dracula back before his hundred year cycle for Castlevania Symphony the night and also brought the Metroidvania back before its hundred year cycle. and that game rules, and I've talked about it a lot. So I will yield the floor to people who have not talked about it to death on retronauts. Well, I'm out.

No, I mean, of course I love that game. And it is interesting to look at it, especially in context of how it's a direct sequel to a relatively linear Castlevania game, except they open it up even more and lean even harder. into the RPG elements by giving you experience points and an inventory and items you can choose from and permanent things, whereas, you know, Rondo of Blood doesn't have those, but it has sort of a persistent status. We're like, oh, you can beat this game and clear these levels when you can play it again and go this way and clear these levels. And if you do it right, you can rescue all the ladies and kill Dracula.

Yeah, and there is a permanent power up in Rondo of Blood. It's called Maria. What do you think about symphony? So Symphony of the Night is, by one definition, was the first Metroidvania. In that originally Metroidvania referred to the Metroid-style Castlevania Games. No, no, I'm pretty sure that when I coined the term, I meant something else entirely. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're good. So, you know, nowadays, I think the, like, I was talking.

with Benj Edwards about the word Metroidvania at one point. And he was frustrated because he really liked when it referred to the Metroid-style Castlevania games or Metroid-style Castlevania style games because he loves those specific Metroid-style games that have RPG components. And it was like, yeah, I kind of get what you mean. Like, it's nice to have a word that you can search and it's going to be the exact type of game you want. And then I thought, well, you know, why don't we just call them Metroidvania RPGs? And that's suggesting, oh, this is the Metroidvania's that have RPG elements. Like,

if we could popularize Metroidvania RPG to refer to the Symphony of the Nightlikes, maybe that would help out those people who want that specific kind of gameplay loop. I like that Metroidvania is a term that organically took hold. It's not something that any one person forced upon the world. Thank you. And there are so many attempts to like build on it or change it or, you know, expand on it. And it's just interesting to me, like language. It's a funny thing.

So is Benj's frustration why he likes to harass me so much when he's on the Retronauts, why gives me such a hard time. I don't know. You'd have to ask him. No, I see. Any other thoughts on Symphony of the Night? I just, I don't know. I feel, I have this thought that I'm like, oh, maybe I shouldn't say it.

Go ahead. Because there are some people out there that like to, they're very insistent that, oh, Symphony of the Night was not inspired by Metroid. It was only inspired by Zelda. And then, you know, I found all sorts of references and some other people sent me references, including Benj, of like, of, I'm blanking on the dude's name. Of Igorashi, you know, saying that it was inspired directly by Super Metroid. And so it's like, oh, well, it was inspired by both, obviously. But I just want those people to know that it was inspired by both.

It was not like just Zelda. Yeah, I mean, Super Metroid and Zelda 3, as we called it back in the day, were very much kindred spirits. They were cut from the same sort of cloth. So, yeah, he definitely was in, or the whole team was definitely inspired by both and took elements from both. And that's great. One other game that probably deserves mention in the 90s a rare Metroidvania in kind of the Metroid-ish game, kind of in the Metroid style, is the divide enemies within for PlayStation, which was an attempt to sort of take that style of game into the third-person viewpoint.

It's not very polished and it's kind of frustrating and not as well-formed as it could be, but you can see, and it's not a Japanese studio that made it. I can't remember who made it, but this is one that just popped into my head. It was very much like trying to do a kind of science fiction and shootery thing with exploration and power-ups, but with wobbly PlayStation 3D, which, you know, that's like a hits my endorphins funny, those distortions and Z buffering issues. So there is a certain charm to it. But, yeah, the Metroidvania, aside from Metroid games and Castlevania games, really, kind of went to sleep for a while. And it wasn't until 2003, 2004, when Dokutsu Monogatari came along, Cave Story,

a freeware game that feels very, very much like one man's attempt to create a game in the style of Metroid for the modern era. And it's not as linear or nonlinear as classic Metroid. It's more Metroid fusion-y where it's fairly linear and then you have spaces you go into and kind of explore around, but it does kind of come back around. There are a lot of permanent power-ups. There are a lot of missable permanent power-ups or a couple. There are alternate paths, alternate endings, interesting ending conditions that unlock new things.

It just feels very much like a game that tries to capture and evoke the atmosphere of classic Metroid in a way that was kind of innovative at the time. Like creating a PC game with 8-bit-style pixel graphics was fresh and new. We have a cave story episode, a patron request coming up pretty soon. So I won't go into too much detail here. But very much a game that I think kind of was the rebirth of interest in the style of game, honestly. It was proof that, hey, you could make a game very much in the spirit of Metroid and Castlevania. That doesn't have to be Metroid or Castlevania. And it's really

good. And also, you can play it for free. Who doesn't love that? One thing I really appreciate about Cave Story is the non-permanent power-ups in that there are some power-ups you can get and then depending on your actions in the game, you will either lose them or trade them for a different power up. And depending on how you play the game, you might end up with some very different weapons at the end of the game. And that affects your strategy and how you play the game. And that's, that's really interesting in a way that I don't think I ever expected at the time. That, oh, I can take this gun. It's a gun if it works. But if I come back here, he will fix my gun, or I can go this way and get this gun. And then another person will fix that gun. It's fascinating how

that all works out. Yeah, and also one of the guns that you can choose to give up kind of doubles as a jetpack. It's basically letting you rocket jump with the downward force of the ammunition. So it feels it feels the most natural like, oh, this is both a power up and a weapon. But in fact, you don't have to play the game way because there's a totally different path you can take. Not that you go through different areas, but because your weapons change, it's like, oh, well, now you don't have that power, but you have a different weapon that has its own advantages in that it gets weaker when you get the mandatory, when you get the little upgrade gems from enemies. It's like, oh, so here's a weapon that actually is strongest when you don't upgrade it.

It's fascinating. Yeah, Cave Story is interesting in its place in Metroidvania history in that it played a role in bringing those into indie space, and yet I don't personally. consider it a Metroidvania like the Metroid influence on it is undeniable but I feel like it's taking a lot of different influences

and making it into like something slightly different and new but yeah it's interesting that it became such a front runner to this Metroidvania indie revival without actually

strictly being a Metroidvania and also that it was not the first indie Metroidvania. Like, Derek, you made one before Cabe Story. But for whatever reason, that one wasn't the one that took off. Yeah, there were a couple. There was also Coogee the Heartless. But yeah, Cave Story, I think, just had the word of mouth and landed at the right time.

And also it was, I don't know, just connected with people in the same way that Undertale did. So, yeah, Cave Story, very cool. And it's okay. This is not a Metroidvania episode. This is a Metroid Influences episode. True. I think, you know, kind of discussing some of those influences, irrespective of its status as a Metroidvania is totally okay. Shadow Complex was also kind of the other, I think the two and the one-two punch for Metroidvania suddenly becoming like a thing. that was different because it was a game developed with kind of not bleeding edge, but, you know, like current high levels of technology, the Unreal Engine.

And it was developed by a pretty significant studio. So, you know, it was kind of these established developers going back to a style of game that they really enjoyed and saying, let's make a game that plays a lot like, that, but now it's going to be a cover shooter because it's the year 2008 or 9. Yeah, it was, yeah, Shadow Complex also came out at a time when downloadable console games were becoming more and more of the thing, which kind of is what allowed this game to exist because doing a 2.5D kind of game during that era and putting it on a disc. was, I think, not considered really financially feasible

because you'd want a really huge game to fit on a disc. And the downloadable ecosystem allowed people to suddenly start coming out with games that were a little smaller, a little more Super Nintendo-sized again. So it was intended to be like, what if Super Metroid had Unreal-style grass? Athens. Mm-hmm.

And, oh, go ahead. Oh, and just that it, it, the success of the game proved to people that, that there was an appetite for, for Metroidvania's that weren't like Metroid Prime or Game Boy games, and which led to a bunch of, it led to a small number of, of, of these happening all at once. Yeah, I talked about this in another episode recently. I don't remember exactly which one, but I think, you know, we do have to bring up, we have to invoke the name of Mario again because in 1996, Super Mario 64 came out and everyone said, oh, 2D games are bad. Everything is 3D now. And then in 2006, 10 years later, new Super Mario Brothers came out and people said, oh, 2D is good again. We can make 2D games. It's okay. It showed that, you know, there was an appetite for that style of game that just because something didn't give you a camera. stick and force you to navigate like 20 buttons to get around. It could still be a good, fun video game. And so you started to see the, you know, more developers start to explore retro style

experiences. And Shadow Complex, I think, worked in part because it was fundamentally a retro style experience, but presented in a like current gen, you know, high technology kind of way where the hero even had a half tuck. Like, that was very of the time. And I was pretty hard on this game when I reviewed it in its original release. I was just like, this is just Super Metroid, but I'd rather just play Super Metroid. And, you know, I, in hindsight, I've come around to realizing that was unfair of me because basically it launched an entire new genre, which is, what if Super Metroid, but now? And, you know, It did a really good job of that and kind of applied that design in an interesting way.

So it's hard for me to be too critical of it. It was more visionary than I was at the time. So that's my bad. But there were some games that were very, very retro. And most of those happened as downloadable 3DS games initially. That includes Steamworld Dig, but also one that's more relevant here, which is Zeo Drifter. a game that is just like, what if the original Metroid had some 3D bits and also were very, very tiny? And Zero Drifter is another game that I was kind of harsh on when it first came out because I didn't really feel like there was much to it.

And I've come around on that one too. And I think it's a pretty fun little bite-sized take on the Metroidvania. Like you can clear it in two hours and it is very repetitive. You're always fighting the same boss. but every time you face the boss, it has a new power to match the new power that you have since the last time you encountered it. So even though you're facing the same basic enemy, it's kind of like a multi-phase boss, like a seven-force or something, where it's iterating and constantly improving on its capabilities. But instead of fighting it in a single phase, like a multi-phase single battle, you're fighting it kind of stretched out across the entire game. and by the time you face it, you've gotten comfortable with the new ability that you have

and have a good sense of how to use it. And then the boss comes in with a new ability that you're going to acquire by defeating him or it. And it forces you to kind of break out of your comfort zone and approach combat in a new and different way than you've been doing for the past 15, 20 minutes. So it's a, you know, very economical, but very clever. I think it's really well done. That was by a toee, but before they were a toi. I can't remember the name of a renegade kid. Yeah, Renegate. That's another good one.

And it certainly, it's funny how all these sort of things came grouped together in sort of, oh, we can sell games this way, which means we can target games this way, which means it's okay to make a game that's a little old fashion, quote unquote, because we don't have to put it on a disc and convince people to spend $50 or $60 on it. And that really opened the door to more games. Thank you. I haven't actually played Zio Drifter, so I have no opinion. It's cute. It's so cute. It's a cute little game. I like that.

Yeah, it's charming. I actually like it better on a console than I did on 3DS, even though you lose the 3D visualization that was kind of the gimmick for it. It's fine without it. You're still doing the Wario Land thing where you jump, like Wario Land for Virtual Boy, where you jump into and out of the environment, which was also in mutant muds by Renegade. Yeah, I did play that one. Yeah. So it's basically mutant muds, but instead of being so much of a puzzle game, it's a little more exploratory, a little more Metroid-y, a little more focused around combat. Pretty good.

I also want to give a shout to Guacamale, which I believe was 2013, 2014. As seen here in Diamond's background, everyone please look, enjoy. Isn't that great? I want to call out Guacamale, even though it is not a Metroid-style game in the sense of you are not. running around in a science fiction setting shooting things. It's very much a melee grappling-based game, very much about wrestling moves as Metroidvania power-ups. To me, this was the game that really cemented the fact that Super Metroid's tutorial concept was a very good idea that everyone should steal. And in Super Metroid, when you gain a new power-up, the environment where you

gain it is designed in a way that you cannot leave that space until you come to terms with the ability you have. So, you know, you pick up like the space jump or something. You can only get out of that room by using the space jump. So, you know, you saw that sometimes in games. Shadow Complex did a bit of that, but Guacamile made it really conspicuous. Like guacamile, it's got the Chozo or maybe they're called Cherizo statues. You know, it's very, very openly patterned after Super Metroid to the point of a little bit of shamelessness, but not in a bad way. It's just a game that knows what it wants to be and what it likes, and it wants you to know that too. And so it really takes that loop where all the wrestling

maneuvers you learn, you have to use them as combat moves and as it like navigation moves, too. And it teaches you immediately the navigational aspect of the dual power-ups you gain or techniques. I guess they're not necessarily power-ups. So it really kind of cemented that structure. And so many games that have borrowed the Metroid style since then have very deliberately taken that note as well to the point where it feels a little stagnant, a little predictable. but I can't hold that against Guacamalei because the developers correctly recognize something that Nintendo did extremely well

and said, we are also just going to just take this idea for ourselves. What else will the book Gluckmonellis so much is that all these moves you learn essentially come with a color association with them, which means now do they figure, oh, well, that way we can put colored blocks in the environment and this is your way

of knowing that this new ability will break those blocks, much like you shoot different colored doors and a certain Metroid. But the fact that all these moves are also momentum-based, and they all have combat value, and as the game goes on, you fight enemies that are weak to certain colors only. So all of a sudden, you get deep into the combat where I was like, okay, I need to string a bunch of moves together, but I need to prioritize this move first to have to break a shield, and then I can link to this other enemy that has a different shield, and it all it all clicks together and it's challenging, but it's also really inviting to like, hey,

you're in this room. How many moves can you link together before you touch the ground again? It's so much fun to mess with and experiment with and figure out what the best way is to possibly take out an entire room of bad guys who all have their own little quirks. I love it. I remember being really excited for Guacamile because it looked like my, two of my three favorite genres are Metroidvania and beat them up, and it looks like a beat-em-up Metroidvania. But then when I played it,

that whole move thing, I think, caused me to, like, bounce off of it because having to remember specific moves, like, I'm terrible at fighting games because I just chaining moves together and remembering these moves and

mastering how to pull off the moves is just like my brain doesn't work like that. I love I love watching people play fighting games. I can't stand playing them. And so having Guacamayla be so focused on that strategy aspect was just like, nah, this isn't for me. Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily my favorite, but I think it's a really well-made game. And I love the visual style of it.

Yeah, it's a great game. And, you know, very much made by people who correctly recognize the good, things about Super Metroid and correctly recognize that sometimes it's okay to just totally steal a great idea and do it yourself and put a new twist on it. So I like that. A final game I want to mention has already been kind of touched on this episode, and that is Axiom Verge, a game that just, you know, very much about recapturing the experience of playing the original Metroid, not just like the look of it and kind of the power up loop, but also just the, the enigmatic world, the mystery of it, the emphasis on glitches, like a big, big element of the game,

is that early on you get a gun that allows you to apply glitches to the world and you can corrupt the environment, you can corrupt enemies. And it just, it really feels like, you know, sort of playing NES games without a net and bumping into the cartridge and, um, accidentally causing everything to glitch out on screen or, you know, experimenting with little programming exploits and oversights and seeing what you can get away with. But it's baked into the game flow. And it is, in my opinion, the single best distillation and modernization of the original Metroid ever produced.

It is now more than a decade old. But it was a great 30th anniversary sort of like, hey, you love Metroid. So did I. let's have a Metroid together. When I came out, I saw it and I was like, I need to make time to play this. This is going on my list. I need to play this. And I'm still waiting to make time.

I still have not made time to play it. I need an excuse. It's like a five, six hour game. And it is not a hollow night where you have to like commit your life to mastering its nuances and memorize every single, you know, shred of the map. It's a little more laid back than that. And the game gives you a ton of weapon options, maybe too many. Yeah. And so you can really kind of approach it.

You can use different kinds of weapons and tackle bosses many different ways. But it's, yeah, it's really good and cool. And I like the fact that the sequel is really a very different game. It's still exploration-based, but totally different. visual style, totally different fields of the gameplay, much less focused on combat and much more about just like figuring out the world around you. Not quite puzzlish, but a little bit. And obviously, we need to shout out the fact that we had a 10th anniversary episode with the creator of Axiom Verge back in 2024. So please, if you want to hear more about Axiom Verge from the guy who made Axiom Verge and me and Jeremy, please go back and listen to that episode because it's a wondrous talk.

time. We have so many interesting episodes in the back catalog. That is a good reason to listen to Retronauts because there's always good old stuff to listen to. We so have this down. We got a legacy here. Sometimes we even talk about things that aren't Metroid. It's crazy.

So I see a note in here that says mention Metroid planets. I want to live on that planet, whatever it is. Well, I have to check this up because this is a fan creation. is essentially a fan remake of Metroid in that you can use this and play the original Metroid with a lot of little quirks, you know, quote unquote quality of life stuff like, you know, it perpetually saves your progress. When you start a new game, you don't start with just 30 life and you have to like refill all your stuff.

You can refill your stuff quickly, that kind of thing. The controls are a little juked. So it's like I personally, whenever I play the original Metroid, if I fall into any amount of liquid, there's like a 50-50 chance I'm just dying. I'm not getting out of that. And Metroid Planets kind of tweaks the jump physics a little bit that makes it a little easier to get out of those death traps. But what's really exciting with Metroid Planets is there are other planets,

quote unquote, where you enter a new code and you basically take Samus to a new planet that is a randomized Metroid-like adventure. So Metroid Planets is a great way to revisit the original Metroid and also experiment with the formula and see, oh, how quickly can I get through another Metroid game that is generated on the fly, so I don't know where anything is. I have to explore it all over again. So, yeah, I highly recommend playing Metro Planets on a computer.

It is, of course, a fan work. So it is completely free. So check that out. Hmm. Intriguing. Yeah. Right. This has been a longer episode than my elderly brain.

normally approves of, but that's okay because we got through all five chapters of this single podcast episode and a mere two episodes. So good job for us. Yeah. I don't want to point fingers. I don't want to point fingers, but there's someone who's not here who was here last time and suddenly we got through the whole shebang faster. Someone who is known for podcasting five or six episodes about a single game.

Yes. But no, there's no fingers here. We don't judge people. We are a holistic, inviting podcast about old games. So if you come on the old video podcast and you have so much to say about all video games, you make us run long, that is a positive. Yeah. But today we're glad we got it in two hours. And change.

I never mind. Oh, go ahead. What I'm hearing here is that maybe the last episode wasn't my fault. Perhaps. We don't point fingers. We're not pointing fingers. We don't point fingers, you see. I have an arm cannon and I cannot point fingers because they're, I can, but you can't see them.

You have to use the x-ray visor. Anyway, this wraps it up for Metroid. Like I said, I'm never going to talk about this game again. This is the end for me. So thanks for taking this wild ride with me. It's been 20 years of talking about Metroid and now I'm done. That sounds like a challenge. No, the very first, actually zero-eth episode of Retronauts was about Metroid, and that was almost exactly 20 years ago, Metroid 2.

So was it just Metroid? I think it was just Metroid. It was like a Metroid 20th anniversary celebration. And now here we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Metroid's 20th anniversary. So I guess join us again in 20 years for the 60th anniversary of Metroid, the 20th anniversary. of the 20th anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the 20th anniversary of Metroid. It'll be good times. But that's still a ways away.

That's thousands of episodes away. So for, or like 1,500, for the time being, let's wrap this one up and go home or I guess we're probably all at home already. So go take a nap. I don't know. Whatever you choose to do with the rest of your day, I give that day to you. So I will say this has been retronauts. You can find us on the internet, basically, just about any form of podcast listening distribution service.

Or you can get it directly from the tap at retronauts.com. We're fresher that way. Let's see. You can support us on Patreon. And that gives you access to a lot of exclusives, episodes that are not released to the public, including Diamond's weekly this month in Retronauts columns, in the monthly, this month in Retronauts community podcasts and biweekly full-ass episodes of the Metroid, or the, the Metroidvania. Oh, my God.

The Retronauts podcast, some of which are about Metroidvanias. This is not one of those episodes, but if you join us, I believe next Friday, there will be one. And you can enjoy that. But only if you are subscribed to our Patreon, five bucks a month, get you all of that stuff and Discord access. also a warm, tingly feeling in your stomach from a job well done. You have kept us fed and alive for another month, and we appreciate that. We do not take it for granted. Thank you for your support. It makes it possible for me to make impossible to keep promises like I will never talk about Metroid again. Anyway, Kate, where can we find you on the internet?

You can find me by searching for critical Kate on Blue Sky or YouTube or possibly Google. Be sure to turn off AI. It'll tell you weird things about all of us that aren't true. It just hallucinate stuff. Said I was an interior's designer. Now I want to see what it says about me. I've never, I've never, yeah. I just noticed that behind you, is that Carmen San Diego's hat?

Are you, in fact, Carmen San Diego? Has this where she's been hiding all this time? It's clearly not Carmen San Diego's hat because it does not yet have a black band around it, you know. It's a tiny little window I can't see. I'll have to take your word. Maybe I can AI hallucinate one and spread more lies to the world. I'm working on it. All right.

So did you say where we can find you? You did. That's correct. Yes. And then I followed up with a stupid joke. That's my style. Diamond, what's your style? Well, I want to mention that the columns,

I write for Retronuts are Patreon supporters. I have already written columns about the original Metroid, Metroid 2, Super Metroid, Guacamayle, Axiom Verge, Cave Story, many Castlevania's that there are themselves inspired by the Metroid sequence. So I've written a lot of words and spoken them aloud about this topic in the past. You can enjoy them. But if you want to just see what I'm doing on the Internet in general, you can look for Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that is my last name. CLUB, that's an English word. So look for that on social medias, and you'll find my random thoughts of the day, or maybe how much pizza I've eaten in New York City,

or where I'm going once I get home back in Japan. But then again, I have to go out and it'll be TGS time soon. Oh, my goodness. I'm so busy. Well, after recorded TGS, that'll be fun. Oh, what an idea, maybe. A grand plan. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, here on Retronauts,

on the internet as Jeremy Parrish. You can find many videos about Metroid and Metroid adjacent games that I have created. And also many podcasts about Metroid and Metroid adjacent games that I have created here on the podcast, this podcast. So, yeah, thanks for your support. Thanks for listening. And again, this is it for me. No more Metroid. It's going to be very sad, but I'm sure it'll never happen again.

Yes. Thanks for joining us on the Metroid Knott's podcast. Ha, ha.