Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 104: Metroidvania origins, vol. 1

Episode Date: June 19, 2017

Benj Edwards and Chris Sims join Jeremy for what was intended to be a quick overview of 8-bit games that helped define non-linear platforming but ultimately gets bogged down in exploring side paths as in any metroidvania worth its salt, really.

This week in Retronauts, we're backtracking for justice. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of Retronauts East. Jeremy Parrish. And joining me this week, we have luminaries from the internet, such as Chris Sims. Where are you a luminary these days? Just all around. Probably at your local comic book shop is the best place to find me. But I'll plug all that stuff at the end of the show. Okay. And also Ben Edwards. And you, of course, write for... Everywhere. Vintagecompeting.com. You guys are so vague. Yeah. I'm hard. Well, anyway... Bad as selling myself. As you can tell from the vagueness, this is another Retronauts East here on the East Coast of America. And this week we are, it is cloudy, yes,

but probably not when this episode comes out. Who even knows. But this week we are talking about a topic near and dear to my heart. And mine too. And DaVinja's heart. And definitely mine. All right. And that topic is the origins of Metroidvania. And I don't necessarily mean the word. I mean, like the genre. I mean, we can talk about the origins of the it if you want to. There's a lot of disinformation. That one seems pretty simple to me. That one seems like an easy one to get to. I get blamed for it a lot. I get some something that might shed a little bit of light on it from research. Really? Yeah, a little bit. Really? That's exciting. But yes, this is a style of game that all of us really enjoy. And I guess we, you know,

we could sit down and do individual episodes on like pitfall or something, but that might be kind of a stretch. I thought instead we should just talk about how the idea of exploratory nonlinear platformers came into being and so on and so forth. And basically, this is like a podcast version of my Metroidvania.com website, which I haven't touched in like two or three years. So this is an encapsulation of your entire career, Jeremy. It is basically, yes. Metroidvania is going to be on your tombstone, I think.

Oh, that's disappointing. I was wanting pepperoni and cheese. I really hope that instead of a tombstone you just have a stairway descending into a complicated and possibly inserted chastled. I have a warfare. I have a warpier on there. Anyway, yes.

So, Metroidvania. This episode was actually kind of prompted and inspired by not only the fact that all of us like this style of game and everyone has said, like, oh, I'd love to talk about those in an episode sometime. But also by the fact that Metroid, its U.S. release, hits its 30th anniversary in about a month. What the hell? Wow. Yeah. I think that was, well, it was either July or August. August, 1987, but seriously, what the hell?

187. So that's one thing. And the other is that recently the topic, or the term Metroidvania has come under fire by people who are very grumpy about it. Some of them are linguistic prescriptivists

who are like, this imaginary word has to be used in precisely this way. It has to be used the way I demand it is used or else everyone is stupid. And then there are other people who would just think that the word itself is stupid. And, you know, maybe they have a point. But as people tend to say whenever this topic comes up, Metroidvania, the word caught on not because any one person was

writing really cool stuff using the word a lot, but because it's a descriptive word. Like you say it and it's evocative. It tells you what you need to know. And that's the definition of a good word. It's functional. It's effective. Interrupt that while researching this episode, I look back at a lot of Jeremy's writings about Metroidvania, and the first paragraph is always some kind of defensive thing about the term. I did not coin it, and, you know, it might be stupid. And no matter how many times I say that, people still are like, well, ever since Jeremy Parrish came up with a word, no, I didn't invent the word. It's certainly a lot handier than the word we used to have, which was like action game with RPG elements.

Right. Yeah. Side-scrolling 2D action platformer plus. RPG, you know, like Castlevania. Even action RPG. Like, that's very vague. Is an action RPG top down, side scrolling? What element of it is an RPG? That's

not what Metrovania is describing. Metrovania is describing sort of the process of the game, the exploration, the sense of discovery, the sense of being in sort of a contiguous space that gradually unfolds

and shows you new things as you acquire new abilities or learn new things about the space or so on and so forth. The thing that I wrote down in my notes when we first started taking notes and talking about the list of games that we were going to use for this was what

exactly do you two think are these defining elements? Like, it's got to have the exploration. Does it necessarily have to have like inventory management? Because that was a big part of Symphony the Night for me. I wrote down what I think is a metro venue. Well, first, first. No, first you want to talk about how it came up.

In the truest, purest form of the word Metroidvania, it specifically describes like five Castlevania games designed in the style of Castlevania Symphony of the Night, which everyone said, you know, when Symphony came out like, wow, Castlevania just went full on Metroid. Look at that map. That map looks exactly like Super Metroid. And this game is basically Super Metroid. And everyone thought that for a long time and it made sense. And then a few years ago, uh, when the bloodstained ritual of the night actually before that that like the year before that Kickstarter when opened up Koji Igarashi

who produced and directed those games I interviewed him and a couple of other people interviewed him at the same time at GDC I want to say

2013 2014 and ask him you know like what do you think about the word Metroidvania he's like well one I'm not using that

to describe my games because Metroid is like a copyrighted word that belongs or trademarked word that belongs to Nintendo. It's someone else's game. But also, Castlevania Symphony of the Night didn't draw on Metroid.

It was inspired by Zelda. So all this time we were wrong. I'm calling BS on that. I have, I have, from EGM June 2002, there's an article, it's a preview of Castlevania Harmony of Dissinence, and it's written by, oh man, I can't pronounce this. Che Chachau.

Che Chow. I didn't want to butcher it. So it says, for all the Game Boy Advance Encore, Konami has given the series back to the able hands of Koji Igarashi, the visionary behind Symphony Night, a game that all but reinvented Castlevania with its Super Metroid-inspired gameplay. And it says, quote, Super Metroid is a great game that had a lot of direct influence over Symphony, Igarashi tells us, during a recent visit to Konami's American headquarters. I can't wait for a Metroid 4 on the Game Boy Advance. I see. So this is one of those personal retcons where I think he is actually trying to distance himself from that word a little bit. Yeah, I don't buy it. I don't buy the Zelda 2 thing. I think it's a Metroid all the way. No, I mean, there's definitely a lot of Zelda. Not Zelda, like the legend of Zelda. Yeah, when we get to talking about, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, when we get to talking about Zelda, I have some questions to ask.

Okay. I'll tell you, just as an aside, from interviewing people over the years, many, many people, you know, people do change their minds about things over the years and they discover and decide new things. They sort of ruminate on ideas and come to new conclusions about where things came from, even if they don't know where it was. In fact, I've read your things, Jeremy, where sometimes you'll cite Metroidvania came from like a forum post and then you're like Scott Sharkey and this and that. I don't know where it came from. It was on a forum on Scott Sharkey's, like a post on Scott Sharkey's forums. So you've evolved your stance of where it came from, you've never claimed to be the original.

I've pretty much always said it came from a forum post on Scott Sharkey's forums describing those Castlevini games. I don't think I've never said anything else. Well, I found some. I found some. I don't have it in front of me. Go on. I'll bring it. I'll print it out. No, no, we need it here. What does it say? No, it's just sometimes you'd say it was a forum post.

Sometimes you'd say you heard it from Scott Sharkey. That's all. Yeah, I don't remember if it was a post by Sharkey, but I just like conflate it. It was on his forums. Okay. There you go. So that's not, I don't think I've been inconsistent on that, but, you know, I definitely do see where people are, you know, interviewed about the same topic over and over through the years. Like, their story does evolve. They get tired of telling the same story. Or, you know, they start thinking like, well, you know, there's probably more to it than that as they contemplate it more. I recently saw a forum post on Hardcore Gaming 101's forums talking about

Hirnobu Sakaguchi and the origin of the name Final Fantasy. And for a long time, it's been sort of believed, like, Final Fantasy got its name because Square Soft was in dire straits, and that was their last ditch effort, like, they were not going to survive if they didn't succeed with that game. And Sakaguchi has recently said, no, that's not it. I just wanted a name that started with two Fs. effu in Japanese. Like, that's, that's all it was.

Um, but then I looked back and I found an interview that was in next generation magazine that I actually summarized for the GIA back in the gaming intelligence agency back in 1999. It was. It was very governmental. Uh, I can't talk about it. But the, uh, yeah, in that interview, he said, like, none of my games had been successful.

So this was it for me. So I think people, there's been some misinterpretation. and then, you know, like, ideas kind of take their own life in the public space. And then the people who are sort of the origin point of those ideas have to kind of reel it in and say, well, there's more nuance to it than that. Or you misunderstood or, you know, the telephone game has happened. That's true. The nuance point is good because journalists like to stamp things out in black and white.

They take it as all or nothing. So there's a lot of nuance that's missing out when you take a tiny little quote from somebody's interview. Well, and also just the nature of interviews, especially when you're interiors. interviewing someone in another language. Yeah, that's really good. There's always the translation issue. And believe me, Igarashi has had some pretty bogus interpreters through the years. I've had my share of really frustrating experiences trying to talk to him. But, you know, like, also you always have limited time when you're interviewing talent for the most part. Occasionally you get

longer interviews, but generally you're like trying to get as much information as quickly as possible. So there's not always a lot of opportunity to follow up on those questions. So it's just the, it's the frustrating nature of, of trying to get information from people who make video games for whatever reason. You know, when someone works under the auspices of a publisher and they have PR managing them, it's just really hard to get time with them. Yeah. And it's really hard to, you know, get truth from them. Not even truth, but just like fully developed information to have a proper conversation. So, so I think, this is kind of getting into the weeds, but this has always been a frustration for me. I bet Ega just, you know, like anyone who had played games

was influenced by everything he had played before. He probably didn't sit down and say, I'm going to make a Castlevania that's like Metroid or like Zelda. He probably just like, I'm just going to make a cool ass game. And he drew from all of his experiences up to that point. Yeah. I mean, Eager really like his, he has said his favorite Castlevania game is Castlevania 3, which was not an exploratory game, but had like branching paths. And then he worked, kind of came in late in the development cycle and did some testing and work on Castlevania Dracula X Rondo of Blood for PC Engine, which took that branching path concept and expanded it even further. So there's like all these sub-stages and hidden areas

and everything. And I feel like Symphony in the Night is just the natural evolution of that. Like instead of, you know, giving you that sort of space that you had in Rondo of Blood and making it linear, it's saying, well, what if you could backtrack? And, you know, you go back and find the secrets without having to just, you know, go to a map screen menu selection and choose and try to find the path that way. So, yeah, I feel like Symphony was a lot of ideas coming together all at once. And I'm sure there was influence. There had to have been influence from Super Metroid. I mean, look at that map.

Yeah. But also from Zelda, because there is more of an RPG element. There's more use of sort of classic RPG elements, you know, swords and equipment and magic spells and things like that that. that you don't have a Metroid. Super Metroid also doesn't have, you know, RPG leveling up, like experience points and stuff, like Symphony of the Night does. It just has equipment upgrades.

Metroid, right, but, you know, games in that style, yeah. There have been plenty of games that we'll talk about in this episode, assuming we ever get off the introsection. Well, one thing that I think is interesting about the, the EGovania games is that they do really feel like natural extensions of, I mean, a couple of things that we're going to talk about. Like, it's everything that California. Castlevania 2 gets wrong and everything that Castlevania 3 gets right comes back in, you know, there's a weird little diversion to Castlevania 4 that tries to go back to what made Castlevania 1 really good.

And then you get to stuff like Symphony the Night that combines those RPG elements, the exploration, the moving away from the critical paths, Alucard, stuff like that. Yeah, it's, I mean, this is probably a topic for another Castlevania episode. But if you look at the Castlevania series evolution, Castlevania 4 is like this weird sort of. like regressive side branch and then the game that was presented as a side story Dracula X feels like an actual adaptation and evolution of Castlevania 3 so Konami didn't really know what to do with Castlevania they haven't for a long time which is why we got Symphony of the Night is kind of like yeah you guys just go do whatever we're going to focus on this in 64 game that's going to be the future and then we're going to

make a dream cast game it's going to be great so yeah but you know when I think when people kind of get the freedom to do sort of whatever they want, interesting things happen. And that's what happened with Symphony of the Night. But we're not going to talk about Symphony of the Night in theory in this episode. Because this is about the origins of the Metroidvania

genre. But it goes right back to Symphony of the Night. It does, but we're not going to get that far. The genre was crystallized. It was. We're just going to talk about 8-bit games because that's where all the crystallization happened. Like the formative elements were sort of baked from, you know, like 1975 through 1992 or so that's that's 15 years of of of games evolving and you know video games as a medium pretty much evolved like came and it took shape during that time we're talking about action platformers nonlinear RPG like elements from those pretty much and not yeah exactly not every game not every game that we're going to talk about isn't is necessarily fully formed in that sense and that's that's that's

their precursors. Well, before we move on, we should talk about the origin of the term just for a second because so many people bicker about it. I heard Jeremy Parrish came up with it. Yeah, he did. That Jeremy Parrish is so cool. Well, the first time I remember, you know, I think Jeremy told me like 10 years ago that Scott Sharkey made it up or something.

I read it somewhere. And then so I went back on the internet and tried to find the earliest. possible reference to the term Metroidvania on the internet. The earliest I can find at printing out right here is from May 10th, 2003, from a review of Castellania

Aria of Sorrow by Ed Oskiro. Okay. So that was, he was on a game spot, right? I have no idea. He's just, it's just a reviewer on Amazon.com. Huh, okay. But that'd be funny if he was a professional game reviewer. I know the name. Really? Yeah. For those of you hoping that Aria would get away from the Castleroyd or Metroidvania style of gameplay, you'll undoubtedly be annoyed, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's the earliest I do. I do remember Castleroyd getting thrown around. Castle Royd is, uh, is, it's very bad. They make a topical wait for it. There's a video over and just slather it up. There's a video of you and Scott and Chris Kohler, you know, arguing about it in the rain. Is that still, is that still on the internet? It's somebody put it on YouTube.

Wow. It's still fun to watch. Okay. So Scott says, Retronauts, what were they called? Retronauts bonus stage? I thought those were all gone,

lost like tears in the rain. There's somebody needs to archive those. So Scott says, the first thing he says is he prefers a term Castleroid. And so I also found that, I asked Ernie Smith, a friend of mine who runs TDM.com,

to look into the Metroidvania thing because he's good at researching too. And he found a bunch of French references from 2003 that call it Metrovania. Metrovania. I like Metrovania a lot, actually. You're going to change it right now.

I live in the city. It's the origin of Metroid is that it was Metro Android? Yeah, Metro, but in the sense of the Japanese term, which is, yeah, like Subway, like the Tokyo Metro. I like Metrovania. I think we need to, I think we need to. Subwayvania. Scratching everything out in my notes. I'm okay with that.

It's a little more punctual, a little more concise, punctual. Yeah, so that's about all I have to say. I mean, I found lots of references. from 2003, 2004, on forums and stuff. It definitely predates the influence of Jeremy Parrish and Scott Sharkey on the internet. But Jeremy is responsible for popularizing. I saw that term and picked it up in 2003. I remember because I had just started working at OneUp.com.

So that was, I started there in August 2003. So it was sometime early in my tenure there. And I saw that on Sharkey's forums and was like, that's a great word. And then probably I just didn't quite. understand that it was meant to be like a limited description. Like they were specifically speaking about those Castlevania games. So I was like, oh yeah,

games that kind of evolve and you know, like flow like Castlevania and Metroid. Yeah, okay, cool. That's a great... Jeremy is responsible for applying it to a wide genre, I think. Now there's a category on Steam, Metroidvania, Wikipedia on Moby Games. The first time that I saw a

got a press release from a developer describing their own game as Metroidvania. I was like, oh my gosh. Did I do that? Yeah, sorry. Did I do that? Well, Jeremy is a hero to me because there's a time when... The only person...

I don't know, around 2003, when he started writing for EGM and one-up, there was a... You know, the dominant genre of game was like 3D platformers and fighting games and stuff. But Jeremy came out and he was like, well, wait a minute, Metroidvania's are awesome. And I was like, yeah, that is my guy. That was exactly the way that I felt. Because back in the late 90s, early 2000s, uh, When gaming started to move into the 32-bit era and the 64-bit era, first-person shooters and 3D action games were all there were.

And I can't play those because I get motion sickness. So all I wanted was more Symphony of the Knights, more stuff like that. There's another thing. It's almost like my disability, which is I'm terrible at quick Twitch action games, where you have to be perfectly precise to progress. You have to, other P-words. And the thing is, if you get hit one time, you explode. like on another game we're going to talk about later or something.

So the thing is, is the Metroidvanias are great for me because I could sit around and level up my character to be stronger and stronger so I could get through the game with less motion skill, like hand-eye coordination kind of skill. And that's why I love them so much. Yeah, my wife plays Candy Crush Saga and Words with Friends and the Igavannias. Wow. Those are her, the only games she likes.

And she likes the Igavenius for precisely the same reason because there is a sense of accomplishment. There's a sense of progression. You know, even if you're not super great at Twitch skills, she usually has me fight the bosses in some of the tougher games because she's not really, she doesn't have a lot of experience. She doesn't have a lot of experience with action games. So, yeah, like, but she likes the sense of the castle unfolding before her and the sense that she's becoming stronger and the sense that she's acquiring more abilities and learning new powers. and things like that, and fighting evermore, you know, dangerous enemies and going back and crushing the early monsters that gave her trouble with no trouble. And in the, in the Castlevania sense, like the grinding to level up, which is not something that you get in a Metroid or its descendants like Axiom verge, for instance, are perfect for handheld games because you can get in, like, you can get in the clock corridor in Symphony of the Night with the, with the Chrysigram, and just go back and forth and kill the final guards. and it's a it's perfect for like a 3DS or a DS because you can do it almost automatically and fill time on a car trip or like I at work when I used to work at the comic book store and no one's in the shop that's Castlevania time that's level up time the uh the two Castlevania Souls games Don's of Soul yeah don of Souls yeah uh sorry sorry too much Duck Souls on the mind oh yeah uh no Ari of Sorrow and Don of Sorrow um

I used to play those on the bus or the train on the way to work and would just like grind for souls and try to max out every single soul because what the hell else are you going to do on a 45-minute train trip? I grind for souls and I don't even play a game while I'm doing it. And the key to those games, I think, and again, not to get super ahead of ourselves, is that they do what a lot of games did poorly,

like in terms of early RPGs and even in terms of Castlevania 2, this is something I wanted to bring up. The grinding in a lot of those is not fun. And the grinding in Castlevania games, the Igavania games, is often very fun, or at least, you know, it has a good feel to it. Yeah. You know, in Don of Sorrow, for instance, you get, like, you learn what soul to use. You learn to use that Minotaur Soul and Backdash, and you can get it done quickly, and it feels good to do it.

And I think that's a really important element of those games that they make the repetitive actions from. We may have discovered something, which is that these action platformers with RPG elements may have been the antidote to those. which, you know, the memorization you required to, that was required to play those early platformers where you had to avoid and dodge and you had to do everything perfectly and it becomes like a memorization game. Those early platformers like Castlevania? Yeah. Yeah. Which is why a lot of people don't like the Metroidvania, the Igavania game, is because they feel like the skill element was lost in Castlevania. I think, I think there are two, different schools of thought. Yeah. Like two valid approaches to Castlevania. Some people can enjoy the, they're all valid

challenging ones and some people can enjoy the cakewalks. Whatever you enjoy is okay with me. It doesn't hurt other people. That's just my philosophy in life. So if you like Castlevania's hard and Twitchy and stuff, that's fine. If you like them like me and you'll help from grinding, then that's good too. I remember coming to a revelation in 1999 while I was playing Final Fantasy 7 sitting on an inflatable chair. I remember it vividly.

Those games are impossible to be bad at. You just need to be patient. because, presumably, like, you can level up, like, as soon as you get out to Midgar, you can just fight enemies and level and level and level and eventually become unstoppable. And you can do the same in Symphony of the Night. The difference is that, like, there's a sort of passive grinding that I think you get, even with the active time battle system in a, like a traditional term-based RPG, versus the more, I guess, physically engaging element of grinding in an Igivania game.

To me, the most satisfying RPGs, are the ones that really carefully balance the need to grind with the ability to advance. That's one thing I really like about the Etri and Odyssey games is I feel like they're really hard if you don't level up. But if you explore cautiously and take your time and then warp back to town and save and then make another little foray and go a little further and just keep doing that. Eventually, you're going to build up your party so that, you know, when it comes time to get to the end of the current area and fight the boss, you'll have a tough time with the boss, but it won't be impossible. Like, there's kind of a natural rhythm to it. And I feel like the best games have that, the best RPGs. And, yeah, the best Castlevania's and, you know, Metroidvania type games definitely have that,

especially the ones with RPG elements. And it's easy to, you know, take those systems and abuse them. And that's okay if that's what you want to do. Oh, it is. Yeah. I enjoy that feeling of being an unstoppable demigard once you get up to the high level. It's like the same thing about using a game genie just to have fun with a game. Some people frown on that.

But, you know, if it lets you get through it and enjoy it, then that's fine, in my opinion. I mean, I played through Kabuki Quantum Fighter for the first time yesterday and got to, like, what's that? Did you cheat on it? Well, I got to stage four and ran out of the continues. So then someone in the stream chat said, you know, there's a level select code. So by God, I used that and I continued from where I died. Awesome.

It was great. So with that in mind, with that in mind, there's a thing that I wanted to throw out, since we do need to tie this back to the origins of the Metroidvania. I think there are a few things that I wrote down as being kind of essential to the genre. And one of them is that action element. Like, I think you can't have a Metroidvania first and foremost without the platforming and the real-time combat. And, like, you press a button, something happens.

Yeah, I mean, structurally, I just mentioned Etrient Odyssey. Like, those games have the structure of a Metroidvania, but no one would call them that because their turn-based RPGs with a dungeon crawler mechanic. Like, they are their own genre, and it's just that they come, you know, they have the, the common RPG heritage to them. Yeah. I think it all has to be, like, not necessarily, like, seamless in the way that, like, Metroid is seamless in that you just, you know, unlock different items and you don't

have an inventory screen, but everything you do has to be done in that particular, like, on that screen. Everything you do on the first screen of Symphony the Night is everything you can do. you jump, you fight, you can cast a spell if you know the inputs. There's no mode change of the game. You're saying it's always a size platformer. We're going to mention journeys, too, and that has mode change. Yeah, but that's not a Metroidvania.

But it is. It's in the origins of the Metroidvania. It's, yeah, it's like Uncle, it's Uncle Metroidvania. Yeah. And there was something else. Now, Jeremy, you wrote in The Anatomy of Zelda about the idea of a funny-shaped keys, which is really stuck with me. Everybody should read the anatomy of Zold if they haven't.

It's very right, good. Thanks. And I think those are an important element of the genre as well that you need to acquire things that allow you to progress in specific ways. And then I think the corollary to that is that there needs to be mandatory and optional exploration and you need to be enticed early on with a thing you can't reach that you have to come back to. Yeah, in Metroid, one of the things that I think is really brilliant about it is that there is no inventory management. The only inventory you manage is like consumable missiles that you have to recharge by killing enemies. And you can swap between the ice beam and the wave beam, depending on which power you get. They're mutually exclusive. So your inventory swapping consists of going back to where one of those is located and picking it up. But yeah, it does, like it turns Samus, the point. protagonist into the key, like everything that you do in the game allows you to go new places, beat new enemies, find new routes. And early on, I think in the second screen, you can see

monsters like in the lower part of the screen. And there's, there's destructible blocks, but you don't realize at the beginning, like, I can bomb through those blocks. You'll realize it later once you get the bombs, you'll be like, oh, wait a minute, I saw those back there. But there's still a hint because you can see the little critter roaming around in the bottom part of the screen and you can't kill it. So it makes you think like, what's down there? Why is, why is there a bad guy there? That's something that you wrote about in the anatomy of Metroid. I did. And I think it, the way that you write about, um, the game teaching you, uh, seamlessly is really interesting. Because you talk about how if you're used to Super Mario

brothers and you run left to right, you hit a dead end. So you are always enticed to backtrack. And I think that's, I think that's a really interesting element to think about in terms of, of game design and how it lures the player onto a specific path. Anyway, the last thing I had written down is I feel like there is a necessity into having a single cohesive environment, no matter whether that environment takes different forms as you move from one area to another, but there needs to be some kind of single location, which I think you get from Castlevania in an interesting way and from Metroid as well. I think it's okay to break up the game into sort of smaller sequences.

Some of the Igavenia games do that. Like Portrait of Ruin, you have a central castle, but from that castle, it kind of serves as a hub. And there is exploration within the castle, but it's much smaller than in other Castlevania games. And then from that... Did you just say Igavania? I did. Then let's just talk about that. Well, I was specifically talking about...

Did you say Metrovania? Or Castlewood? I'm specifically talking about the Castlevania games developed by Coach Igarashi. Okay. I'm using Igavania to specifically denote his games. But Portrait of Ruin, you branch out of the explorable castle into, I think there's like eight different areas throughout the game. And those are self-contained spaces, but you still kind of do some exploration and backtracking within those. They're a bit more linear.

Maybe that's why I didn't like that game. An order of Ecclesia is the same thing also. Yeah, but Ecclesia has the benefit of it all being unified by being Transylvania. It takes it in a bigger scale that I think plays with. the Castlevania 2 stuff in an interesting way. Yeah. Like the idea of progressing through the world to get to Castlevania. Yeah. Yeah. So there are a lot of different, I think, valid interpretations for how an exploratory platform or a Metroidvania can work.

And that's the whole thing. It's like I'm not really into the, like I said, the linguistic prescriptivism. Language is fluid. Yeah. And so our video game concepts. It depends on how you use it. So, you know, 50 years from now, if we're still talking about this, they may consider Metroidvanius to be something entirely different. It's all just Dark Souls all the way down. So let's talk about the very, very early days here before there were Metroidvania games, before there were that many games, the formative years.

I want to talk about the games that sort of inspired the genres that Metroidvania sort of mashes up, and that's RPGs and platformers. To me, the RPG, like the origins of the video game RPG are very interesting because you have several different games in series that kind of try to say, like, let's take the experience of playing an RPG on a tabletop and turn it into a video game experience. And you can't have the full tabletop RPG experience within a video game because the technology just isn't there. Like, really, RPGs are about camaraderie and social things. Yeah, there's social. It's about, like, the dungeon master coming up with a story and improvising and trying to outsmart the players and the players trying to, like, crack the code and the puzzle that the dungeon master has created, the, you know, the story master. What is the proper term for that?

Dungeon master. The game master. The generic term is game master, yeah. GM, okay. Dungeon master was a little short guy who looked like Yoda in a cartoon. That's a copyrighted term from Wizards of the Coast. Okay, there you go. So the game master.

And, you know, a video game just can't do all those things, although people would give it their best. So instead, what you had was basically a bunch of different people taking different aspects of the tabletop pin-in-paper RPG and saying, let's go with that. So the sort of... It became a statistical crunching exercise. Well, some of them did, but then you also had Zork, which was entirely about the storytelling, the narrative. There was no stat crunching really besides your score, and combat was extremely loose. Like you would get into a fight, and sometimes you'd win, sometimes you wouldn't. There were only a couple of different combat opportunities, mainly with the thief.

By the way, Zork's original name was dungeon, after Dungeons and Dragons. Yep. And one thing that I think is really interesting is that, like you talked about, there's kind of a fundamental disconnect between especially early video games and the table table. experience in that there's a rule book and there are players who abide entirely by the rules as written in tabletop games. But the idea is that you

can do anything. You know, the joke that I always make when I'm running my games is, you know, it's a game of choices. Like, yeah, you can do whatever you want. It's, there will be consequences. But with even with a Zork, you have limited inputs, limited syntax that you can use. And so I feel like a lot of those early games

like Zork, like Adventure, all are trying to recreate the aspect of tabletop gaming that you can recreate, which is the dungeon map, like the Tomb of Horror style thing, where Zork, I think, especially draws from that because Tomb of Horrors is like weirdly specific, if anyone's ever gone back in red, the Tomb of Horrors module,

this famously difficult dungeon that was made for a tournament. It's very specific on what you have to do and when you have to do it. And I think you get Zorke reinterpreting that idea. in a way that's really interesting. Yeah. So I kind of nailed down like four, five different RPG concepts that sort of build off of the tabletop RPG in different directions.

And you have Zork with the narrative. You have wizardry. That's really focused on the dungeon. Like wizardry is about the dungeon. It's about the systems. It's about the numbers. Ultima is a little bit of both, especially once you get to like Ultima 4.

And it stops being so much about like go kill the bad guy and more about like go live a virtuous life and be an inspiration to everyone. And then you have adventure, the Atari 2,600 game, which distills that into a very simple action style, yeah, with graphics. And that's kind of the inflection point for stuff like Zelda and Hydeleid and East. And Sword Quest. And Sword Quest, yes.

So an adventure, you have an inventory, just one thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You hold, you switch items. Yeah, let's talk about Zork first, actually, since we already kind of brought it up. But I kind of feel like that is the first video game to sort of do the Metroidvania thing. But is it a video game. It is a video game. It is a video game.

I have a definition. Video games cannot be played on a video device. I mean, if a game can be played on a teletype, it's not a video game. Okay, whatever. It's a computer game. Sure. You have fun with that. Didn't we just go through like half an hour of linguistic scriptivism?

Yeah, language is fluid except when you're in. I've thought about this a lot. Clearly. But we're going to call it a video game for our purposes because it started out. It was on a video screens, on computers. I don't think anyone really said, you know what would be great is if people played our game Zork on a teletype. They did, though, at first. Dungeon. Dungeon was played on teletype.

I did a whole teletype game slideshow. You should go read it. I should, I guess. but that was not sort of the ultimate evolution in it. Yeah, that wasn't where most people played it. It was not published by Infocom and Activision for play on your home teletype. It was meant for your Apple 2 or C-604. Although it originated as a mainframe game distributed kind of freely among universities.

But anyway, let's not get too far into the weeds on telling people what they can and cannot call video games since the whole point of this episode is like, do your own thing. Um, Zork, I feel is the first game to really kind of, really, I think, nail the concept of an inventory and to, uh, to take that inventory and apply it to the game world and make it essential for progression. Um, I can't really think of an example of games that did that before. I mean, I know Zorke is, is heavily inspired by colossal cave adventure, but that's a much more limited game in terms of, of the inventory and so forth. Yeah, you know, I can't think how much inventory is involved in an adventure. There's a little bit, but it's much more about

sort of just finding your way around, coming up with the right descriptions for everything. Whereas Zork, you know, you have things like the mysterious object. Yeah, the lamp. You have like this sort of plastic-y thing, and it turns out that's a raft. You can inflate it. There's a hot air balloon also.

It's been a while since I've played, but there's a lot of, like, vehicular type stuff. and inventory items, you know, swords and keys and things like that. And it's all kind of puzzle-ish, you know, like figuring out how to open up the egg. What year was the adventure for the 2600? That was 79, I think. And Zork was 77 initially. Yeah.

So, you know, as far as inventory games. I think Zork was officially published in 1980. Yeah. For commercial, yeah, for use. But it existed, you know, and it's sort of formative. The artwork for that is incredible, by the way. The first personal software. It's a guy with a sword.

It's like, it makes it so dramatic and high fantasy type illustration for a game that has a lot of humor to it and stuff. Yeah, it seems a little out of keeping. But he does have, like, all the stuff. He's got, like, you know, treasures and things. Treasures under his arm, yeah. But, yeah. Giant cast. in the background instead of a little white house.

The commercial version of Zork that came out was actually only half the game. Zork 2 was the other half, and it just, it wouldn't all fit on a discette, or in a packaged product. So actually, Zork, as it existed originally on the mainframe,

was a more robust game than the one that came out in 1980. But this was where I think, you know, you really saw someone say, inventory, yes, let's do that. Let's make the things that you discover sort of the keys to unlocking the puzzle of the world. And that is,

that is such an essential part of the Metroidvania thing. RPGs to a certain degree have really lost that. Is that a part of D&D, pen and paper? Is there inventory stuff? Oh, yeah. Your character has an inventory, yeah. It depends on the kind of, I think, module you're playing. Like, if it's just a combat module,

you're just going to be getting, like, equipment and stuff. But a lot of, a lot of modules and quests are really built around the idea of, like, the puzzle dungeon, I think. There's a lot of, there's a lot of rules about incoming. and how much you are allowed to carry that a lot of like did a lot of people that I know consider to be optional but there's also an idea of getting stuff that you can put together in interesting new ways like if you have you have a lamp then you also have lamp oil and if you have lamb oil that means you can start fires and that's always fun um what really gets me about zork is the idea of uh that it does have that contiguous persistent environment that you can't map based on, you know, if I go north, there's this. If I go west, there's this. And there are some parts of the maze that sort of defy that. They're like very confusing. But yes, for the most part, like, you can create a concrete physical representation of the dungeon.

Yeah, it's always really interesting to me to go, like, look up, I love looking at maps people have made of Zork. Yeah, there's an official one in the clue books. And you've seen that Zork one that has like little swords drawn inside. Oh, it's actually really beautiful. It's like the kind of fantasy stuff that I loved when I was a kid. when I was a kid over and over again because my brother would play Zork on as Atari 800, so I had that map. He put it up on the wall and I'd be like, wow, there's the chalice in that sword.

So these games appeal to the sort of people who look at a video game, like, drawn map and think, what's out there? I want to explore this space. And also people, like my brother, like to map those games himself before they, the games would map them, you know, before auto mapping. I remember when Metroid came out, like, I had graph paper and I made very, very good maps, like one screen per graph square. and I did that with a few different games. I wish I still had those because they were pro quality by God. Yeah, my friend did some amazing Deadly

Towers maps, which I posted on my blog back in 2005. The fact that somebody would map Deadly Towers is amazing. Yeah, well, we used to play it at the same time. We play simultaneous Deadly Towers, so we'd be on the same screen at the same time. It sounds like some sort of awesome games done quick, like abusive challenge.

It was fun. That's before we had a lot of reliable multiplayer online games. There's a game that was also in the list around this, you know, kind of directly descended from like Adventure and Zorg wizardry that came with graph paper so that you could map it, which I found that out researching today, and I thought that was bananas. Yeah, I mean, you had several of these games show up commercially around 1980, 81. You also had Ultima, I think that was 1980, wizardry was 1981.

And like I said, each of those kind of explored different aspects of the RPG concept. Wizardry, again, was very much just about the dungeon. Like, you created a party of, I think, six characters drawn from different classes, different races, and then you went into the dungeon and you had to explore. There should be a party-based Metroidvania. There's one where you can play two people, right? Well, I mean, there's... We'll talk about Sorcerian.

Sorcerian, okay. And the Dressel family, what if... Oh, yeah, Drossel family? Yeah. The other thing about Zorg that I think really gets to what makes a Metroid Madridvania at Metroidvania is you are likely to be eaten by a crew. Because if you just wander around, if you just start exploring, which is kind of the nature of that game, you almost immediately hit a challenge that you need a funny shape key for, something that is going to end your game and prevent you from progressing unless you backtrack and go look around and find the proper item. And I think that's like, I think that was probably mind blowing at the time.

And it became like even, you know, before I had played Zork or seen Zork. So you can get to areas way beyond your level. level, you know, and get blown away by him. That's what you're saying. Whereas you're like, oh, I'm not supposed to see this. I better go back. Well, the, uh, the, the, the torch actually kind of puts a limit, like a hard limit on just how long you can dick around in Zork, because eventually you'll run out of light and eventually you'll die, unless I'm misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that you'll eventually run out of light sources. Isn't the brass, brass lamp that has a fuel level to it? Something like, yeah. There's probably a torch, too. We're, we're planning to do a Zork

episode and I'm going to go back and revisit those games before. So I'm not an expert at the moment, but I will be in a month. So yeah, I talked about wizardry a little bit. I haven't really played wizardry, but I've read a lot of let's plays and just researched it a lot because the concept of dungeon exploration is really sort of intoxicating to me. But I find a lot of them are sort of unfriendly and not very playable today. Wizardry is one of those. It's all based on Thacko and things like that. And it's, you know, for a kid who grew up with Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, it's a little hard to wrap my head around that stuff.

Have you ever played The Bards Tale and Might Magic 2 and stuff like that? I need to. Those are good. The Bardsale series is one of the best of the first person, dungeon party, exploring and town part. I think that goes back to the idea of the thing that you can recreate versus the thing that you can't. And you can't recreate like endless options and choices, but you can recreate rules.

and dice rolls Well, also the thing with wizardry is that each sequel became progressively more cruel because it was based around the idea like the concept that you loved wizardry you got all the way down to the bottom

and beat Verdna and now you're going to take your fully leveled party and play the sequel. You're going to carry that class over and you're going to do that for the third game

and then for the fourth game they're like, well, kind of hit the wall on this so what if you were the bad guy and everyone wanted to kill you. So then you, like, play as the enemy, like trying to escape from a dungeon after being imprisoned,

and you're constantly fighting parties of player characters that, like, players sent in to Sirtek. Like, they would send in, you know, discets with their end-game builds from Wizardry 3. Yeah, we talked about that on another podcast. I just love that concept. Like, you're dying. It's very much like what would happen with Dark Souls

in a sense, you know, the... But is it a Metroid? Wizardry? No. Not at all. It's very much dungeon level by dungeon level. But, you know, the roots are there. Like that whole exploration thing and mapping out dungeons and...

Let's talk about Dragon Slayer for a minute. Yes, let's. I don't know if you guys had a chance to watch that video that I did. I did. Is it a side-scrolling action? No, it's top-down. Top-down? Okay. Yeah.

What platform is it? It was a... I want to say, like... Was it one of this Japanese... It was a Japanese... PC... ...Aided one or something. or something like that.

Yeah, it's like a really, really old PC. But it showed up on a lot of other systems, including Game Boy, which is where I played it for the first time. And it's really interesting. Like you are a guy in a maze, and you're trying to slay a dragon, hence the name. It's all very self-explanatory.

But in this maze, you have a home. It is literally a house. And you can actually pick up and carry this house around and move it to different places in the maze. And to level up, you have to, like, go out and find these items and then take them back to your house. And once you get back to your house, then they will be, like, transferred to you.

It's kind of like, you know, in some RPGs where you have to go and camp out by the campfire, you know, like, rest or something in order to take your level up. It's kind of like that. But it's very much like you can see where games like Zelda came from because you are, like, running around a top-down map, killing stuff, fighting stuff. And there's also this element to it where it really doesn't do any good for you to grind in this game, because every time you kill an enemy, it dies, and then it comes back as an enemy of the next higher tier. So the more enemies you kill, the more difficult the dungeon becomes because they reincarnate as, like, a more dangerous enemy.

And it's one of those games where levels are very, very important. Like, if you fight an enemy that's, you know, a level below you, you'll destroy it. But if you fight an enemy that's a level above you, you're going to die. So it's one of those. It's very grindy. It's very... It was from 1984. It was first published on the PC801, PC901.

Those are NAC machines, I think, Sharp X1 and FM7. Major success in Japan, according to Wikipedia. Yep. Yeah, I mean, it showed up. on a ton of different systems. So that was the series that eventually gave birth

to legacy of the wizard. Okay. But we'll get to that in time. I think the... The thing that stuck with me from watching the Game Boy World video was that you cannot beat this game without destroy it, like literally destroying

your Game Boy. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how true that is, but supposedly, like, to be able to beat this game, you have to, like, plug it. I mean, you can't beat it on a single battery run, I think, because it's really, I don't know. I'd have to go back and recheck my notes, but

yeah, it's not a very friendly game. There's no way to save your progress. I don't think. So, yeah. You can have an AC adapter for it, right? Right, but someone said they tried to do that, and it like melted down their system. I don't know. That could

be apocryphal. I found out of that in YouTube comments, but still, I'm willing to believe it. It's kind of a janky port. And, like, I can see where in 1984, I can see where in 1984, someone with a, you know, a PC would be like, this game is really cool. But in 2017, it's a harder self. So, let's see, the other games, we didn't really talk about adventure. I know that's a game that you really like Binge, and you keep mentioning that it has an inventory system, sort of.

It has as much of an inventory system is missed, which is to say you can carry something. Yeah, you alternate between items, a single item at a time. There's also, I think, a glitch where you can carry two items at once, but it's not really how it's meant to be played. All I know is the dragons look like ducks. They do. Seahors is really. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's like an overhead, top-down adventure game,

graphical, inspired by adventure, the colossal cave adventure and all that. I don't know how it deals with Metroidvania's other than the inventory thing, the adventure thing. No, it's one of the, it's not Metrovania in any sense. It's really, no, it's an important, it's an important, like, stepping stone toward the concept. Yeah. Like, that's what we're talking about. Graphical adventure. Yeah.

I mean, what adventure did was it took this, you know, complicated text-based PC concept and distilled it into something that you could experience on a console with a single stick and a single button. It's like 256 bytes of RAM. Right. So it was really like, what it accomplished was all conceptual. It was in terms of accessibility, in terms of distillation, like taking something very complex and just winnowing it down to something very basic and accessible. And that's, you know, like, to me... Definitely a precursor of Zelda and Dragon Slater of those things.

Yeah, definitely. To me, like, a big part of a Metroidvania game is that level of accessibility. It's not a full-on RPG. It has maybe some RPG concepts to it, but... You don't have to know the numbers to do it. You can play visceral, actually. action, you know, if you get it, like what Chris was saying, is easy to get into and you have that action element. So then, Ultima is another one. I guess there's not really too much

to say about that vis-a-vis Metroidvania games, just that Ultima was sort of like kind of where the RPG started to come into its own. Ultima 3, I think, Exodus. It was really the first really good one in the series. Yeah. And like I said, It sort of took the narrative of Zork and the dungeon crawling of wizardry and managed to make them work together. So it was a much fuller, more robust RPG experience than anything that had come before and would go on to be very influential. We should do an Ultima podcast. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I need to play some more Ultima before I can talk about it.

We can play it all in real time, a 3,000-hour podcast. Yeah, that'll be great. I'll just stream Ultima. Watch me grind. Watch me find Ambrosia. And then finally, I think kind of like the most immediate antecedent to these games would be the Legend of Zelda East 1 and 2 and hide light. You know, these top-down adventures that's pronounced Y as 1 and 2. Thank you very much.

No, really not. This is the question I have. This is the question I have written down my notes. Is the Legend of Zelda a Metroidvania? No. It's not, but it's so close. It's not a platformer. Is that the only thing that distinguishes it?

Because it does have leveling up, it does have an inventory system, it does have a contiguous environment, it does have challenges that you have to backtrack to when you get new abilities. All of the elements are there in The Legend of Zoldov. It has some, quote, side scrolling. When you go down and get the boomerang and stuff underneath your quote from the side, you know. But, yeah. No, it just doesn't feel like it to me. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things like, if you want to call it that, okay. I mean, I definitely included it here as a, is an antecedent.

Yeah, but I really feel like Metroidvania came into being... You have to be able to jump. Not necessarily. But it came into being when, you know, someone wanted to combine the action of a platformer, Super Mario Brothers, say, with the exploration and inventory mechanics of Zelda. And that's where it kind of comes into being. But no, I see what you're saying. Here is the...

The spirit is there. Here's the corollary question. is Super Mario World a Metroidvania? No. Backtracking? No way. Inventory? Nothing unlocks new stages, like new items and stuff like that.

No, if you do unlock new items, but there's no persistence. But there's no persistence with like the switch palaces and which levels you've beaten, but within Mario's inventory, there's no persistence. When you take a hit, you lose your fireflower, you lose the cape. Also, there's an overworld, so they're not all connected. the world. I'd like to see a Super Mario Metroidvania.

That'd be pretty... Me too. Kirby's done it. Why can't Mario? I don't actually think, before anyone gets yelled at it, I don't actually think Zelda and Mario World

are like Metroidvania-style games. But I do think the only thing that distinguishes them if you really kind of break down what those important elements are is that they don't feel like it. No, I mean, that's why I kind of laugh

when people get really, really uptight about how you can use the word Metroidvania because one, it's a made-up word. It's just, it was just recently invented, so who cares? But also, like, it's so ambiguous. Like, why does it have to be specific? It really does get down to, you know, does it feel?

Yeah, I don't know what Metroidvania is, but I know what I like. It's a genre that was crystallized with Symphony of the Night. And I think that people, you know, you can now apply. Once it was perfected with Symphony of Night, in my opinion, you can apply it to all kinds of other games that are similar. They compare it to it to. It was like... I mean, we wouldn't have indie gaming without Metroidvania. I was just talking to somebody about genres of painting,

which are called, you know, styles or schools of style or whatever. And so somebody would paint some really awesome painting and a new style. And other people would copy it. And it would become a whole new school of art. Like, Metroidvania became something like that after Symphony of the Night. So they loved it. They wanted to make more of them, you know, similar to that game. And now we can look back and see some games that were similar to that.

But before it was just crystallized into the performance. perfect form, which was Symphony of the Night. Yeah, I mean, people were doing impressionistic-like things before Impressionism became an actual school of art. So would you consider, like, some of Van Gogh stuff, impressionistic? Yeah, I don't know. You could always, you can always go back and find earlier examples of something before they were noticed, you know, or popular. Yeah. So, so really, I mean, this is, what I want is for this, this podcast episode to sort of maybe give some definition to something. ambiguous, but I don't want to, like, pin down and say, this game is a

Metroidvania, and this game is not. Like, it doesn't matter. It's about the spirit of the thing. Like, go forth, go into the video game, imaginary world, and explore, become more powerful. That's, that's the best thing about video gaming right there. Discovery and empowerment. Go do that. That is good. Even if you don't want to call it metric. Having fun. What I'm hearing is the Super Mario world is absolutely a Metroidvania. There's no persistence to Mario's powers. That's the big problem. we're just saying

we're not going to say it is or it isn't but yeah Super Mario doesn't have an upgrade path yeah he doesn't have enough all he has is temporary

abilities yeah single use items in Metrovania games there are but that's not the core of the Metroidvania games that's true

yep if Sam has lost her spin attack then that would be that would be something every time she got hit oh that'd be the worst take it up in a flower

lame okay anyway we're we're an hour in almost so let's take ourselves a break and come back and dig into the real

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Okay, I actually, no. There's only one lush here, and it's not me. Not me. That's our fourth participant. Yes, the lush in the corner. He's asleep now, so be quiet. So, yeah, we've talked about, you know, kind of the general overview of Metroidvania games. We've talked about the RPG origins.

Now, let's get into the meat of it. and talk about platformer origins. Obviously, the platform genre, more or less, for all intents and purposes, began with Donkey Kong. The idea of a little dude running and jumping across hazards and pits. Platforms.

Platforms, yes. Those are very much a part of the platformer genre, using his jump abilities to leap, obstacles, hazards, and hop onto platforms. Yep. But obviously, Donkey Kong is not a metroving. game. Don't even try. Just don't go there.

That would be one hell of a cool Metroid viny. Donkey Kong Country Metroidvania. Donkey Kong was the Dracula-Kong country. Donkey Kong 94 for Game Boy as a Metroidvania. Donkey Kong with a sword. There's probably a Smash Brothers mod for that. Donkey Kong with a sword.

Wait, Santa Claus with a sword? Yeah, like the Lion and Witch and a Wardrobe. Who's that guy? What was that guy who wrote that with Santa Claus? C.S. Louis? Yeah. Yeah, that guy Santa Claus with a sword

Yeah, there's a Santa Claus book I've heard of Santa with muscles But there's like a fantasy Santa Claus Origins book I'm not even kidding It's called like The Story of Santa Claus or something

I've read the Hogfather It's crazy So there's a Santa makes a cameo In one of those movies He's in Secret of Mata Is that what you're thinking of? I don't know

This has nothing to do with Metrovinias But there is a very good series of letters That J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his kids from Santa Claus that because it's Tolkien

The screw tape letters No way That's the S Lewis That's like cookie letters But because it's J.R.R. Tolkien Like about 10 years in There starts to be wars with goblins And they're really good

Very very obscure That was my favorite part of Jesus' crucifixion Wow Wait that was Easter never mind You're going somewhere We shouldn't even touch All right Is the Bible of Metroidvania?

Yeah Jesus No it's pretty much a linear path There's some backtracking Yeah Level of I mean, I guess, yeah, like, Jesus gets an upgrade at some point.

What is the New Testament, if not a second castle? Oh, boy. The inverted castle. I just cut that part out. I don't want to get firebombed. I'm just telling right now. Okay, so anyway, Donkey Kong, that happened in 1981. By 1983, people were already like,

hey, what if we took this platformer genre and made it about adventure and exploration and discovery? So you have games like Pitfall, Montezuma's Revenge, Pharaoh's Curse, Jet Set Willy, all these games where you're running and jumping, like in Donkey Kong, but also exploring contiguous spaces and acquiring things and learning and mapping and all these great stuff that we associate with Metroidvania's. I wouldn't call any of these games Metroidvanias, but by God, they are on the way. There's another game, Indiana Jones on the 2600 where you have inventory,

and you adventure around and stuff. It's sort of in this vein. E.T. also. Yeah. E.T. They were developed by the same guy, I think. Howard Scott. Warsaw.

Pitfall, you even have the enticement for exploration because you can see the cave, I guess, is what it is. Which came first? Pitfall or Donkey Kong? Donkey Kong. Pitfall is 82, I think. So Donkey Kong, I'd say, I mean, that's the first I know of jumping platformers I can think of. Yeah, I mean, the idea. of kind of like moving through a side-on view existed.

You had, you know, crap, what was it called? Space Panic, which was kind of basically like Hayanko Alien. Oh, yes, there we go. There we go. It is. It's Hayankio Alien turned on its side. And Space Panic that inspired Load Runner. But you don't jump in that one.

You do fall. Like you can drill holes and you fall. So there is the concept of gravity, but you don't have the mechanism. of jumping there was a there was a game by crap i can remember who called frog in like 1980 and you can jump in that but it's not really frogs it is about a frog like you're jumping and moving across lily pads and trying to catch bugs is that a vic 20 game no it was an arcade game it has like a it's one of those that has like a like very simple uh black and white graphics and that was projected over like a silk screened background to give it the impression of greater

like visual depth yeah that makes sense those overlay things but donkey Kong was where it really came to kind of came together there's a neat quote by miamoto who about donkey Kong where he was talking about the difficulty of combining doing two things at the same time like jumping while moving or something like that you're more familiar with him than me so i haven't seen that quote but i'm sure he's very correct about that um donkey Kong was a revolution in game design. Like, it's, it's, it's an intuitive concept. Avoiding things while having to jump, while having to move, you know, up and down.

Yeah, like, I think, I think running and jumping is an intuitive concept, but, you know, asking people to be able to do that in a video game when all they had done is, like, move around mazes or whatever. That was, that was asking a lot. It was, it was pretty complicated. And, you know, um, it's almost the first 3D game. Nah. Because you go up. Nah. Okay.

That's, that's 2D. Only two dimensions. In your mind. In your mind, sure. Everything is 3D in your mind. 40 if you take enough acid. That's true. So yeah, anyway, pitfall, like pitfall kind of is like a four-dimensional game in a sense

because the geography of the jungle doesn't actually make sense. It's, what, 250s? Well, it wraps around, and it's 256 screens. But if you go through the lower path, the tunnels underneath, you actually like skip forward, I think, four screens at a time. I remember that now, yeah. So it takes some kind of getting used to. And like you have to sort of understand how the spaces relate to one another in order to be able to finish it.

And you have, I think, 20 minutes to collect 16 treasures or something. And they're all scattered around through the underground. And there are, you know, there are passages that take you between the overground and the underground. And there are walls that block you off underground. So you have to, like, find the proper route and find the most efficient path. Seriously. I hate him to brick wall. It's a very simple game.

Who built this brick wall here? It was David Crane. Yeah. David Crane hate you. Blast him. Yeah. But he made a very, very exciting and challenging and very sophisticated game. What about the sequel?

That was awesome. Pitfall 2 is much more of what you think of as a Metroidvania. Yes. It's not just a... There is backtracking. It's not just a linear left-to-right thing. There is up and down. And there is more backtracking.

That game was amazing. Just amazing when it came out. Well, I mean, it just blows my mind. You're trying to find a quick claw. Is that the guy? Your dog or your lion? I think you're a mountain lion. Quick claw.

Yeah. From the cartoon. So at the very beginning, you're teased because you see Quick claw like right below on the same screen. But you've got to get there through this crazy circuitous path through all these different platforms and things. And yeah, you can backtrack. And there are these neat little, the first instance of probably safe. Save spots, save points, whatever you call it, like checkpoints, maybe. Where you can go thing, and then you can restart there if you get hit, which is awesome.

So you can have some progression there. It's just neat because it's up and down, left, right, platforming. No, no, not the Konami could. Oh, okay, never mind. And Farrow's curse also is really neat. My brother used to play that in the Atari. Both of those kind of are of a piece with one other, I think. They have a lot of action platforming where you collect.

treasure and you whip things and you, you know, jump around and there's exploration, sort of semi-fantasy elements that are more, you know, based on Egyptian-type things. And those are great games. They're good precursors of this Metroidvania. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about those very briefly. Those take place in a very self-contained space, like Montezuma's Revenge, you're in like an Aztec Pyramid. In Fero's Curse, you're in an Egyptian pyramid. And you're finding treasures, collecting keys, avoiding enemies, moving over traps and so forth, trying to, I think, depending on the game, just, you know, meet some objective, like collecting all the treasures or something within a certain time limit.

Yeah, those are great games. We should talk about also berserkalikes sometime. Berserkalikes, okay. Like Seamus. Are there a lot of those? The tangent. I think there's only a couple. Like overhead maze games where you shoot and you avoid the walls.

Anyway, I love those. Tangent. Yeah, that is very much a tangent. And then also worth mentioning is on the British side of things, you had Jetset Willie, which was a 2D platformer. It also takes place in a contiguous space, and it's a screen-by-screen thing. Like each screen is sort of a self-contained trap. And there's no like inventory or anything. You're just kind of running around and avoiding just these very random hazards that live in a guy's house.

It's very strange. but it's extremely challenging and really kind of plays up the concept of like you're in a space and you can move back and forth and you have to like find your way through and solve the puzzles. No, that was, I can't remember who developed it.

This was for the spectrum, right? Yeah, it was spectrum. But I can't remember the name of the company. Is this the same thing that became solar jet man on the NES? No, that's rare. That's rare. Okay. That was Jetpack.

Jetpack, okay. And that was my ultimate play of the game, which became rare. Dang, you're good. But Jetsett Willie was by some other company whose name I forget. But Rare does kind of come into play here because they created a game called NightLore. Remember we talked about that first Batman game? Yeah. That first Batman game was part of an entire movement of people who were inspired by NightLore, the isometric platform.

Yeah, screen-by-screen platforming. It's crazy. And you really didn't have persistent inventory in that either. So you didn't get like power-ups or anything. But there was a lot of platforming and exploration and moving around and trying to find your way through a maze while trying to figure out, like, exactly how objects in that 3D space related to one other, which was the real challenge of those games. But Night Lower was the one that really kicked that off. And so you had stuff like Batman, head over heels, a ton of other games that I don't know because I didn't grow up in England. Yeah, me neither.

But we should have. You did. I mean. Only. Yeah. Some people think I did. Like Blake. Yeah. Shout out to Blake.

Well, I mean you do like Joe a lot. So some of these are actually like follow-ups to other games. Sorcerian, the first one, was a game by Falcom, the creators of Dragon Slayer. And Sorcerian is actually a sequel to Dragon Slayer. But instead of being a top-down game where one guy is moving his house around through a maze, it's a platformer where you control an entire RPG party. Have you seen this game in action? I have.

And the thing that I wrote down was that it's the human centipede of action RPGs. It's very unappealing. Yeah, it's like I. see what they were trying to do with it. They were trying to say, hey, you've got an RPG party. You know, like in some of the Final Fantasy games where you walk around and there's like the party trailing behind you. Okay, so it does that, but in a 2D perspective.

And I guess the closest thing that you might have seen on an American console would be Mickey Mouscapade, where Minnie followed around behind you. And if you imagine how frustrating it was to have one character following behind you as you were being attacked by enemies. Imagine if you had three following behind you. At least you don't have to move each one, like press pause and switch characters and move each one at a time, like on, I don't know,

Sweet Home or something or one of those. Three Dirty Dwarves? Yeah, something like that. Or whatever that is. Three Dirty Dwarves? No, no, sorry, sorry. I think I'm thinking of the Lost Vikings and North West. And Dors by Northwest.

Yeah, I hate that. There are a lot of games. There is a game called Three Dirty Dwarms. There's some of those D&DND. gold box games where you have to switch characters and move them around one at a time for a dungeon. Yeah, it's tedious. Yeah.

Not a fan, but this is not like that. And so you're moving all your characters at once. And it has like RPG mechanics. It's convenience. There was something happening there, but it just didn't quite work out. You're not moving your house. You're moving your household. You get really interesting, like, the most interesting part of this game,

and I didn't play it, but I did watch an extensive YouTube video. the character generation actually looked really like had me thinking this game was going to be very appealing like it's you have character portraits for each class and type combination and you get to name everybody

and you get to assign stats and I think that stuff's really cool and then you get into this snake of adventurers where if one person jumps on a thing of spikes everybody does lemmings it's a party

yeah I think they really meant well but boy that just did not work out. Then you have sort of like the beginnings of real action RPGs. I want to call out Dragon Buster by Namco and Winga Modola, Modolo No Sabasa by Sunsoft. Both of those are games that don't quite get it right, but they're close, they're close. They came out, I think Dragon Busters, 1984, Madola No Sabasa is December, 1986, and it's just like a month or two before Zelda 2. Yeah. That's amazing. Wasn't it an arcade game first? It was.

Yeah. I remember playing that on, you know, the first time I played it on Namco Classics or something, was it a Namco game? Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, man, this is going to be so awesome. But it didn't quite get there for me. Because I was like, man, is this like a Metroidvania in 1980? No, but I mean, it's got that kind of like the branching path approach where you have, you like see a world map and you can go one of two directions on the world map. And you have. different experiences that way. And the world map is kind of designed to be like, you know, a pin and paper set up where, oh, there's a town, there's a dungeon, there's a field, there's a forest. In practice, it doesn't really play like that. And the RPG mechanics really amount to you have hit points that are sapped very quickly

by all the bad guys. And you have like some magic spells. I mean, it's an arcade game. So they wanted quarters. So they're not going to let you play forever. Yeah. I think, I think Wonder Boy, too, did a much better job of, of doing that, that, that take, taking that same concept and running with it.

But that, that came quite a bit later, like 1988. So what can you do? Then Wing of Adola, I mean, there's a, there's a game center CX episode about that. Yeah, it's on the, on the Retro Game Master DVDs. Do you have notes on that, Chris? I do have notes on it. Yeah, tell us about it, because I'm talking a lot. Here's, here's my question about Wing of Bidola.

Is this one of the earliest games where you're playing as a woman who has to save a Prince. It is. That part, I think, is really interesting. I think, actually, I think the game is really interesting itself in the way that it presents itself, because you are given, uh, uh, the upgrades are level dependent. So if you, like, and there's a stage select code. So if you switch to like level 12, then you've got all the stuff that you would have

acquired over the course of the game by then. Uh, I do think it's, it's punishingly, uh, difficult. And it's one of those games that I think is kind of crucially flawed in that you can beat the final boss and not win the game. Oh, really? How does that happen? You have to have the ability to fly. You have to have the wing of medola to get to the top of the stage. And if you use all your MP on the final boss, you're just stuck there having essentially

beaten the game, but unable to progress. Yeah, Sunsoft was in a sort of formative stage right around that point. There's a great series where, oh, man, I can't remember the guy's name. He's French. No, his Twitter handle is Gaza Maluk. He's been, like, really researching the history and evolution of Sunsoft. And this was in a period where Sunsoft was going from, like, arcade game makers to home game makers. And, like, a year or two after Wing of Modola, they really just nail it, start creating games like Blastermaster that are just, like, so good.

Really good. But this, like, they also made Atlantis No Nazo, which is kind of that infamous game that hates everybody. and it just didn't quite work, but they were on to something. But yeah, the biggest problem I have with Madole, wing of Madola, is that there's no invincibility grace period. Like, we get hit by an enemy, and it'll, like, fly into you and then just hover over you, and it just sap your energy. So in, like, three seconds, you can go from fully, you know, like full health to dead. Yeah, and because it's, so unforgiving. Because it's one of those early NES games, there is a, you have to hold select to continue.

but if you don't, if you die, you just go back to the start of the game. I have a question. Why would anybody design a game like that? I don't know. I think they just didn't know better. Like, it was video games were still, well, video games were still like this sort of, we have the ability to make a video game. What do we do?

Like, genres hadn't been nailed down. Super Mario Brothers was a year old by that point. I blame arcades, you know? Yeah. They want to kill you as fast as you can so you can get more quarters. Well, it's that they can. It's that Super Mario Brothers, Japanese Super Mario Brothers, too. strategy where it's like, oh, what you want is

harder stuff, right? Like you want it to be more difficult and get more time out of it as opposed to the enjoyment of like a thing that plays there than you try and must have really enjoyed sitting around mastering these things more than Americans. Do you think culturally? No, I mean, I think American kids really enjoyed this. I mean, they did, but you know, the Japanese versions of a lot of NES games were a lot harder. Some of them. Initially

and then the American versions were much harder because of the rental market. There's a twist. Rentals were outlawed in Japan in the late 80s, video game rentals. You can rent music over there. There are cafes where you just go and rent music and then the minidisc was huge in Japan because people would rent music and then go copy it onto their mini discs.

But video games, I think Nintendo pushed really hard to get video game rentals banned. So you can't rent video games there. It's purchase only even now. Whereas the rental market exploded here and Nintendo was not able to shut that down. So there were definitely some games where Japanese devs were like, we don't want people to finish this in a weekend,

so let's make it really hard. Like Ninja Guidon 3, they took out Unlimited Continues and gave you five continues because everything's evil. I don't know, maybe Kabuki Quantum Fighters the same way. You only get like three continues in that one.

You need to have those Kabuki quantum skills. Yeah, yeah. But I do feel that Metroidvania games are kind of the antidote They're like, not the antidote to that, but the sort of counterpoint to that. They are games that are not necessarily super difficult. But because they are bigger and more exploratory, you still won't necessarily be able to finish them in a weekend. They have a different kind of challenge.

And I think that became possible as game cartridges, as game media became larger and had more capacity for, you know, a bigger world. Like when you're trying to fit something into 64K, there's only so much you can do. but when you have 640K, wow, there's so much more potential for a big expansive game there. And progression is such a key part of Metroidvania games that not having the ability to save that progression is a huge detriment to the playing style. So now let's talk about the real Metroidvania. The real Metroidvania begins here. The real Castleroid? Yes, the Real Castleroid.

With 1986's Metroid by Nintendo. It is, in my notes, it says, a seminal adventure. You play in a massive, freely explorable maze, broken into five separate zones. Protagonist Samus as weapons double as keys. Missiles unlocked doors. High jump provides access to new areas. Bombs break barriers. And there's no inventory screen.

It's all seamless. It's famous high jump goggles. That's my brother's favorite joke. Okay. I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense. Oh, okay. I never actually played Metroid.

Whoa, what? Yeah. What? I missed it when I was a kid playing. And it's like, I don't know why I'm here with this reveal. And I don't know that I've ever finished a Metroid game. Like, I've played Fusion and I've played Zero Mission. Not even Super Metroid?

I have never finished Super Metroid either. All right. Blastfully. Go home and download a virtual console version of Super Metroid. I was very reluctant to bring it up because I knew this would happen. I know there's people yelling right now. You're along friends. Yeah, no.

I actually am envious of you because you have the opportunity to play Super Metroid all the way through now for the first time. That's such a great game. Yeah, it is. It is just...

Although it may have been better in 94 when it came out than it is today. Sure. I mean, that's pretty much true for everything. Yeah. But I mean, if you play... Go back in time.

Invented Time machine. Play it in 94 and you'll understand why we love it. If you play Super Metroid all the way through, you'll be like, oh, every indie game is this. It is like...

Well, I feel like at this point, it's one of those things where I feel like I've... You know, I love Metroid Metroidvania-style games. I love Igovanias, Castleroids, Metrovanias. I love them so much, and I've played so much that's influenced by it that I feel like I wouldn't be able to go back and look at it through the proper lens. It's still so good. Is it really? Like, really damn good. I mean, it's still one of the best games. It's all time. It's really well designed. It's extremely well designed. It's so good. Yeah, it's a masterpiece. There might be like one or two points where you find yourself going, what do I need to do now. But you actually might not. If you've played games that build on Super Metroid, like the sort of. elements where it becomes like the key points where it becomes a little bit like oh now you need to backtrack or now you need to use a special ability like that probably won't be so confusing

to you as it was for people who played it for the first time in 1994 because every game has done that now it is like it's the beetles of video games yeah it's there's we used to argue online about the citizen cane and video games and all the stuff and one of the contenders would be super Metroid I think another is like super marie brothers or something but you know I have this EGM from 97 here as top 100 games of all time. Number one magazine is 20 years old. Shit.

Look at that. November 1997. We're all dead. We're all dead. Yeah. So Super Metroid is number one right there in that magazine. This is, this has trading cards. Just so incredibly. Yeah, I remember picking up this episode

or this issue. And at the time I was kind of like, I liked some EGM issues and sometimes I was like, I don't know what these guys are talking about, but I picked this up expecting to really be angry about their top 10 list, their top 100. And then I got to number one. I was like, whoa, these guys get me. They understand Jeremy Parrish.

That's why I emailed Crispin Boyer. I was like, this is, you guys nailed it. Yeah, so like after this issue came out, I was like, okay, EGM, that's good stuff. I'm going to buy this magazine. And I did. I subscribed since 93. Yeah. That's how I met.

Jeremy. This thing has Symphony of the Night at number 12. That's clearly incorrect. It was brand new. They didn't know. They didn't want to go too high on it. Some people would place it above Super Metroid these days. But I mean, this is the issue. This is the issue where it was first review. Game number two is the All-Stars edition of Super Mario Brothers Street. That's a little weird. Yeah, but look, look at this. This is EGM, November 1997. This is the first issue with the review of the review of Symphony of the Night.

It's also number 12 in their top 100 games of all time in the same issue. So that's a pretty good, you know. This isn't the one with Super Metroid at the top. This has Tetris at the top. So we're totally wrong. Super Metroid is number. Number six. What are we talking about?

What are we talking about? What are we talking about? There was an issue of EGM that had a top 100 and Metroid was at the top. Okay, well, Tetris is a good choice. I remember I read a, back in the 90s. There was a magazine that I had called Flux. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

Yeah, you remember Flux magazine? Yeah, I had the flux sometimes. I had to take a pill for it. The world's most dangerous video game and comic zine. And they put space invaders at number one, which I... That's lame. Yeah. So I think a couple of years later, they did a follow-up.

And that had Super Metroid at the top. And I appreciated that because I was like, oh, this isn't like the classic rock station's top songs of all time, where it's always going to be like Layla followed by Stairway to Heaven. It's actually, they actually took the time to reconsider. That was nice. I appreciate that. But this was a good list. Symphony of the Night, yeah.

Debuting at 12 there, it's pretty good. I mean, this list came out half the lifespan of the video games industry, though. It's ridiculous. Plus, if you uncover the game's greatest secret, you'll double its length. Yeah, yeah, we're not telling.

Says EGM about. Some high jump goggles. There's a torture rack, and it actually stretches the game to twice its length. That's pretty cool. All right, so anyway, Metroid. I'm surprised that you haven't played that, Chris, but you should definitely check it out. It's 30 years old. Did you know that? That was a great opportunity to go back and revisit that for the first time. It has some great music too. Yeah. Again, like I've played

I played Zero Mission. I played Fusion. I played Axiom Verge. So. Well, you've played Metroid then. Yeah. Metro is great. I had, I found it difficult as a kid and I went back and played it as a teenager all the way through for the first time in the 90s. I will say, I have read The Anatomy of Metroid. There you go. There you go. So you understand that there are some very tall, tall passages. Yes, there are. That's what a year. Very tall. The interesting thing about Metroid is that its sequel actually kind of dialed back a lot

on the nonlinear exploration. Like, it definitely has that, but it's much more of a structured game. It's gated not so much by Samus's abilities, but by arbitrary feats that she has to perform. You kill enough Metroids in the world and all of a sudden there's an earthquake and the water levels drop

and you can go to the next area which it feels a little artificial compared to the other Metroid games. I was disappointed with that game when it came out. I remember getting it and the animation is janky as crap like you have two frames.

What do you expect man? I know but you've got these big ass clown shoes and you're going like it's just terrible. The graphics took a step back. They really pushed what the Game Boy could do. And sometimes it feels like they pushed a little too hard. But I do feel like the change in structure was a reflection of the change in platform because Metroid, you know,

with just kind of like a big open, get lost, go anywhere, kind of feel, that works better for when you're sitting back lounging on a TV. But, you know, for a Game Boy, which is more, more eye-straining, more cramped, plays better in short sessions. I think... Aren't these done by Gunpei Yokoi's R&D2 or something? R&D1. R&1. They were directed by different people. No, Metroid and Metroid 2 both were R&D1.

R&1. But they were directed by different people. Yoshio Sakamoto was the original director of Metroid designer, and he did not work on Metroid 2. Well, what I'm saying is they had a different feel than like the Mario games because they were done by a different branch, you know, semi-competing branch of Nintendo. Yeah, I mean, there was definitely... They went on to do the Wario games, which were sort of the anti-Mario games, which is really

something I didn't know as a kid. Yeah, there was kind of like this fiefdom thing going on with Nintendo's divisions, and R&D1 definitely made games that felt different than EAD where Miyamoto worked. Yeah, man, that's awesome. Okay, so we've got the Metroid, but what about the Vannia? The interesting thing about Castlevania is that even though the first game is like six linear levels, very simple, very straightforward, like the seeds of exploration were always in there. Well, there's a map. There's a map.

There's a really cool map. And the levels actually play out. The levels actually play out. play out as if, like, you are traveling through that map, like, the places you go in the stages, those all line up with what you see on the map. And, you know, I always love talking about the castle in the back or, like, the tower in the background in stage three, where you're like, you see, oh, yeah, I'm going to go there. I'm going to kill Dracula. Or you may not realize it at the time, but the second time you play through the game, you're like, oh, that's where I

had to fight Dracula over and over again until I finally meet the game. So, yeah, there is, like, this physical space to it, but also, at the same time that Castlevania came out in Japan for the Famicom Disc System, it also came out in Japan for the MSX home computer in a game called, like in Japan, that both versions had the same name, Akumajo Dracula, Evil Castle Dracula, but the MSX version has been localized as vampire killer, and it's a different game. It uses a lot of the same graphical assets as Castlevania. It uses a lot of the same kind of general overall structure, but the game itself plays differently instead of being just like six linear stages, it's six non-linear stages, if that makes sense.

It feels like kind of the PC games of that period where within each stage, it was basically like, kind of like an infinite loop, sort of like pitfall, where everything wraps around. And you had to acquire cash and buy items and find like shops to get through each stage and complete different tasks within each level. You're back now. Vampire Killer was cool. I played through it one time, but it was, you know, 12 years ago, so I don't remember as much. But, yeah, I remember it being different, definitely. Well, and then you have Castlevania 2, which takes those two games and combines them into one.

Like, Castlevania 2 really feels like the synthesis of Castlevania and Vampire Killer. And that's the true first Metroidvania. I think so. It is, and it is unfortunately a very bad game. You think so? It's not a very bad game. It's incredibly frustrating. It has some problems.

Its vision exceeds its reach. That is fair. That is definitely fair. There's so many good ideas. Like the idea of a contiguous space that you travel through, like the idea that you, even storyline ideas. Transylvania, okay, so instead of taking place in the castle, Castlevania 2 takes place outside the castle with the goal being to get to the castle at the end and finish off

the Dracula once and for all. With all of his bits and pieces. Yes. To collect along the way. But you actually travel through Transylvania, and again, it's a kind of wrap-around map, and it branches and goes off to different little areas and has one-way paths, and it has secret paths that have to be completed by holding a crystal in a certain space and ducking, which is terrible. The graveyard duck. Yeah, the graveyard duck doesn't actually exist. There are no ducks.

Everything it tries to do is a really good idea, but whether it's limitations of technology or, whether it's just that this was the first time a lot of that stuff had been tried, it doesn't hold together at all. It ends up being super frustrating, which sucks because I don't, like, you can see the DNA of Castlevania 2 in Breath of the Wild,

even. Like, there's a day-night cycle with where the NPCs go inside and the monsters come out and get stronger. Yeah, I'm trying to think where there are games that had day-night cycles before that? Ocarina-of-Time had day-night cycles, but not before that. I'm just saying,

that's what I'm pre-preed breath for a while. There must have been something that had a day-night cycle, but maybe like an RPG. But having that in a platform game was really interesting. And you had RPG levels. The experience system is very limited. Like you gain experience and money by collecting hearts from fallen enemies. Like now they're currency and also experience. But you can only level up to a certain point in each area.

Like in the first area, once you level up once, you don't gain any more experience from the enemies you beat. So you have to constantly find more difficult enemies. And unfortunately, this game really lends itself to grinding because there's a time limit and it's a pretty strict time limit to find your way all the way through the game and get the best ending. So to grind for levels, you want to go into the mansions where you find Dracula's bits to collect and also where time stops.

So you just spend time in the mansion, killing enemies and getting experience until you reach max level for that area, get droulders. Dracula's bits and head on to the next mansion. There's something about that game. I just can't force myself to play it, even though I remember watching my brother play it, and I like the music and everything. But I guess it was just so hard. Like, it was just so hard.

And the nighttime was terrifying for me. It's a terrible night to have a... I mean, all the enemies become twice as difficult. And zombies come out, like the towns... I had an LCD. That was one of the key game elements, the day-night thing, because I had an LCD Tiger Castle in you, and it had the day-night cycle thing in it. It really did, like, a little circle would turn into a crescent, and then all the monsters would be harder.

Oh, okay. I thought, like, the whole LCD screen turned to black. No, that would be awesome. Inverted. It's terrible. Yeah. Yeah, that game is genuinely dark and gothic and frightening to me. I mean, it was as a, yeah, to me as a kid.

It's not like campy, dark. It's like, you know, genuinely terrifying. The book is campy. Oh, I brought my copy of the World's a Power Book. Hold it up to the microphone so we can see it. where Dracula is defeated by puns. I know the feeling. That's how I attack people on Twitter.

It's like Simon Belmont and the Captain Inn and the Game Master. I feel like going back to what we talked about, like very early in this podcast four or five years ago, the one really interesting thing that the Igavania games did was that they made grinding for levels fun and interesting and like put twists on it. and that's something that is just it's such a core part of Castlevania 2 and it's the least fun it could be there's not like a lot of thoughtful enemy placement there's not a lot of

like you the game is very opaque about what you have to do and when deliberately opaque yeah villagers mislead you and it's not a mistranslation like in Japanese villagers mislead you they tell you wrong things tricky but I you know you don't get to

like especially Order of Ecclesia is is eager remaking Castlevania too like down to having the mansions, down to having the travel across a Transylvania Villagers. I mean, I... What is your favorite Metroidvania, Jeremy?

Like of the Castlevania, Metroidvania. It's the either Castle, something of the night, or the Sorrow games. Donof Sorrow is really good. Ari of Sorrow, those are great, yeah, and something in the night. But, yeah, Castlevania, too, like, I agree. It's very flawed, but there is something about it that is very compelling to me. And I think it is the concept of Castle, of Transylvania, of like this actual place with, you know, kind of interesting geography and secrets and villagers who don't necessarily like you. They're like, hey, let's screw this guy over.

Like some people will help you and give you advice and some people will just lie to you or say, get the hell out of town. It's really interesting. I can only imagine, I was just saying this game is terrifying. Like somebody who's 20 now listening to this is going to be like, they're going to play it and be like, this is not terrifying. But I was, you know, what year did this come out? In 1988. Okay, so I was seven years old. How old were you, Chris, in 80?

I didn't play this game until, like, I was six or seven. Yeah. But you were young when you first experienced it. Same, Jeremy, you know, you're about four or five years old with me. I don't know. So, yeah. I was, I was, uh, early teenage years when I played this. What was your impression of the, the atmosphere?

The atmosphere. It was, it was Castlevania, but bigger and, and I could explore. It was like Castlevania and Metroid combined. I really liked that. Yeah. Metroid was the game I cut my NES teeth on. It's hard to describe. I have this feeling that the new generations won't be able to experience these things.

I mean, they obviously won't the way we did. But we're trying to impart this feelings and capture them for posterity of what they felt like at the time when there was nothing else after this. Anyway. It's a game that's openly hostile to the player. Yeah. But not in a way that I think is fun. game can be hostile to you and present you with a challenging environment and people who lie to you and mislead you. And I think that's fine. I think those are all

elements that, you know, again, are in better games and that you don't get to without this game. But it's not fun. Yeah, I agree. I don't know that this is a game I would necessarily recommend to anyone. I tried to do a live stream of it a couple of months ago and discovered that this game does not stream well, and so I skipped right on to Castlevania 3, which streams a lot better. Yeah. It's not nearly as grainy.

Okay, so now that we've laid down the basics, let's wrap up this podcast by talking about the games that kind of came after and sort of led us to Castle, or to Super Metroid and Castlevania something in the night. The 8-bit games that sort of followed in the wake of Metroid and Zelda and Castlevania. This is what we should have been talking about the whole time. We should have, but we kept wandering into the weeds. Exploring. We kept exploring. Or in games. So we've backtracked a lot, and now we're making a final push to the end.

We're not going to talk about these games in total depth. I'll do like 10 words. Yeah, I think it's interesting to sort of look back and see that in Japan right around this time, which is where basically all console games were being made in the late 80s. It took a while for Americans and Europeans to say, oh, consoles, we should do those too. So all the games that we were playing on game systems came out from Japan, and Japan was very heavily influenced the developers there by the success of Zelda, by the success of Dragon Quest, by the success of Metroid, by the success of Castlevania, I guess. Like all of these things were very heavy in their minds, and so you saw a boom of exploratory platformers, and the list I made here is only just kind of scratching the surface of it. There's so many more, but you basically had everyone saying, what if we took action games like Mario, but put RPG in them?

And so you got a ton of games that just like this boom right around 1987, 88 in America, when those games started to be localized of games that really kind of, you know, you went immediately from Nintendo kind of figuring out, oh, this is how side-scrolling platformer should work with Super Mario Brothers in 1985 to, Two years later, everyone's saying, okay, neat, scrolling platformers, but also a big grand adventure. Like, there's this crazy burst of evolution. And, you know, in the beginning of the 90s, I think you sort of saw people pulling away from that and creating more concrete RPGs, like RPGs would be RPGs and platformers would be platformers. I would say, you know, the Nintendo platform became known for these platform action-adventure games. And so there are games like RIGAR and Strider that were, you know, just straight up, action games on the arcade in the arcade and they came and they made them into like more like

you know, Castlevania style games with um adventure and RPG elements on NES because that was expected expected of it. Well I think it was I think there was the question of like okay so we have this arcade game where people put quarters into it and it kills them and that's fine but that's not a good experience for home. It's like a meat grinder. Yeah like that's not fun on a home console. So what can we do to make the home console experience different and better? And so the answer they came up with was not like, let's tweak the balance, but hey, let's redesign how the world works and how the player interacts with it and take these elements of games like Dragon Quest that are so popular and create games that are so immersive and take so long to complete and add that to our platformers. And so, yeah, you do end up with this period in the late 80s of exploratory platformers that then kind of faded away and you didn't really see another boom until like five or six years ago. when all of a sudden indie game developers who grew up playing these games were like,

hey, I like, remember those? Those were great. Let's do those. There's two things I like the most Metroidvanius and rogue likes, and they both, you know, they defined our generation somehow. And they got overlooked for so many years. And then when people started making indie games, they've just exploded. Yeah, I really wanted to make video games.

But I kind of feel like everything I wanted to do in a game has been done now. Because right around the same time, I was like, man, I'd love to make a Metroid Vania game, all these other people didn't just say I'd like to, they actually did it. So, congratulations to them for actually putting their money where their mouth is. I'm lazy, and I didn't do that. So I just realized this episode is almost two hours long

already. So, you know what we're going to do is reconvene in a couple of months and talk about other Metroidvania games. More Troidvenias. More Troidvenias. Should be called Zeldavania Castleroids? Sure. Again, you might want to see a doctor about that.

I think Zeldavania is a... I think there's meat on those, Selderoids. Seldavania. We can talk about the terminology later, but for the purposes of this show, let's just go with Metroidvania. Rigavania. The genre where you throw pizzas at guys? Yeah.

Death pizzas. That's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtian. Yeah, they even have the turtle, the pizza thrower. In Rygar? No, Ninja Turtles. They had the pizza. We're just talking about absolutely nothing now. I think it's time to end to the show.

If this is you guys' way of wrapping it up, it's a pretty good, pretty effective approach. Raiharthro's pizzas. So that thing he shoots out is actually a pizza. It is, yeah. It's called the disc armor, but we all know it's a pizza. I see. Either that, it's the Capcom Yashici.

I don't know. It's one of the two. He's been to Japan too many times. What? No, you know, the thing that you get in the pinwheel in Capcom games. I know exactly what you're talking about. Okay. I know.

Yeah, I've seen it. There's one right before Dr. Wiley's final gauntlet in the original Mega Man. Yeah. I can't remember that. I can't believe. You don't know what the yeshichi is. What's the thing with the pinwheels? That's the, that's the Yoshichi.

What's the cultural significance? I don't know. It's just a thing Capcom did. There's got to be a thing. It's got to be a thing. It's got to be a little symbols. I've never been to Japan and seen someone being. Konami has an equivalent.

It's the, um, what do you? It's Ponovi man. Yeah. He shows up in the Goonies too. Camios. Yep. I think you're going to cancel 80. Yeah.

Yeah, they're more of those. Yeah. And also the Moai Head. What are those things in Kirby and the M things? The tomatoes? Yeah. Don't they come up in other games? Those are very exotic.

I've seen those in Japan, too. Sorry. M's tomatoes of the giant M-M-A-M-os. Those are, like they cost $20 a piece. Oh, yeah. They're shaped in a perfect square. Aren't melons like $80 apiece there? If you get the weird ones that are shaped like pyramids, yes.

They love their melons over there Definitely Metroedvenius So I'm afraid that Like most poorly designed Metrovanias This podcast has devolved into chaos This podcast is a creature of chaos As Alicard would say

Jeremy What do you here? I will not So anyway I think we're going to wrap up here But we'll get together in two months When we're less tired apparently and can speak more on topic

and it'll be exciting and we'll continue talking about Metrovini games because, gosh, there's so much to say about them that we ran out of time. It's a terrible night to have a podcast. It always is. Anyway, so let's wrap.

I'm Jeremy Parrish. This was a very well-organized but ultimately a nonsensical, I guess, fruitless podcast. You've just wasted two hours of your life and it's my fault and I'm proud of myself. You can find me at retronauts.com

The Retronauts podcast is also there. It's on iTunes. It's on the podcast one network and application. We're supported through Patreon as well. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Hooray! Video games. Benj.

Edwards.com, vintagecomputting.com, et cetera. You know who I am. It's a baller move. I am. Like James Bond, we know your name. Yeah. You know who I am. I'm Chris Sims.

You can find links to all the stuff I do at the dash isb.com and you can go to your local comic store where you can find the Sword Quest series that Dynamite's putting out based on the old Atari game that I'm co-writing with my writing partner, Chad Bowers. We've also got a new Deadpool graphic novel out and as we are recording this on this

very day, Ash versus Army of Darkness just started. So go get that stuff. It's good. Are you writing that? Yeah, Chad and I are writing our everywhere, man. Yeah. Well, specifically I'm at Marvel and Dynamite is... That's pretty awesome. Chris is far more important than me. Look up his work.

Barely. No, no, no. Anyway, this was an all-star cast of Metroidvania games that barely touched on Metroidvania games. Join us again in a few months for more talk about Metroidvania games that hopefully will actually be about Metroidvania games. In the meantime, keep on exploring and don't be too snobbish about the word Metroidvania. That's the lesson to take away from here. Love each other. Yes.

Hug each other and then go get a double jump. Super Mario World is Metroidvania. It's over. This podcast is over. The President's Day Sale at Mattress Firm has been extended. It's your last chance to take home a free adjustable base with your qualifying mattress purchase. Up to a $699 value absolutely free. See what customers are raving about, like Breckett and Maryland,

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I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving

of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor, A supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. Med Donahue.