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We're approaching Metroid Prime's 20th anniversary, and the game's original developers are taking the opportunity to share some wild bits of trivia about the game's development.
Zoid Kirsch, a senior engineer at Retro Studios on both Metroid Prime and its first sequel, has been sharing a daily development story leading up to the game's 20th anniversary on November 18. Some you might've been able to guess, like how the game's slow-opening doors mask loading times. Some are technical, like how a compression library "saved" development. Some are about design, like how the devs made it clear you're dealing damage to enemies.
Then there's the wild stuff, like how Metroid Prime sometimes actually shows you its running game code as you're playing. At certain points in the game, like when you approach a Scatter Bombu, Samus's visor turns static-y, obscuring your vision. Normally, you might expect a texture to cover the screen in an instance like this, but the GameCube's limited memory made that solution difficult.
"If we used a low resolution texture (64x64) to save memory the 'static' would be blurry and not crisp," Kirsch explains. "One engineer on the team came up with a great idea: what if we just use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself! We quickly tried it out and it looked amazing."
In this clip as Samus approaches the Pulse Bombu, the screen fills with static to show interference with her visor. As we worked on this a big issue is the memory use of the noise texture. The Gamecube only has 24MB of RAM, so every texture has to be carefully considered. pic.twitter.com/vc9gJNgpT0November 8, 2022
So yes, you can actually see inside the Matrix sometimes as you're playing Metroid Prime - but it's actually not the only game to use a similar technique. As Playdate co-creator Cabel Sasser notes, the same technique is actually used in the Atari classic Yar's Revenge. Now I need a catalog of other games that might do the same thing.
Maybe the most absurd story comes from Jack Mathews, a technical lead engineer on the original Prime. Shortly after the launch of the game, Nintendo contacted Retro about a bad batch of GameCube CPUs, which only seemed to exhibit bugs in Prime. Initially, the devs couldn't figure out a way to test the issue.
"To see the problem, the kit had to be cold," Mathews explains. "Like, freezer cold. So we literally had to put the kit in the freezer, test the game for 15 minutes tops, then start all over. It was crazy. We literally were running the kit from the break room freezer to the TV, and loading save games as fast as possible to as many places as possible in 15 minutes, then trying new code, re-freezing, and back. I'll never forget it."
The bug was eventually fixed for those bad CPUs - but the only way affected players to get the patch at the time was to call Nintendo support and get shipped a whole new disc. The age of digital distribution has its advantages.
Metroid Prime 4 is still in development, but the long-rumored Metroid Prime remaster has yet to be officially announced.
