The world of Metroid first entered my life when I was but a young boy. This was long before the series had become the iconic franchise that it is today. But even back then, there was something special about it that made it stand out from the rest of the Nintendo library. More than any other game, Metroid and its sequels have had a monumental impact on my gaming life. I rented and played the original Metroid for the first time on a late Saturday afternoon. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget my first journey through its dark, foreboding corners. But even when I was at my most nervous or frustrated, the game kept pulling me back in to see it all the way through to the end. It was a challenge that I gladly accepted for whatever reason.
I brought the cartridge home and slipped it into my NES, barely able to contain my excitement. As soon as the game began to play, its moody, evocative music and the stripped-down yet still utterly captivating intro, I was in its grasp. This was just after Christmas, and even though it was an understated kind of holiday, it still managed to be pretty damned festive nonetheless. For me, all of that just contributed to the atmosphere of Metroid, which up until that time had been a game of almost unparalleled mystery, tension, and strategic depth.
Upon setting foot in the barren passageways of Planet Zebes, I recognized the uniqueness of Metroid. The game offered no simple solutions or even straightforward questions. It left me, the player, to figure out pretty much everything. There is an enticing pull to this kind of world, with the appearance of cordial invitation yet a cold reality of threat in the same breath. No hand-holding here; unlimited exploration is practically promised, with an air of penetrable solitude just potent enough to make the unusual, territory-marking creatures met along the way feel like credible dangers; it is the player’s task to improvise the path to the game’s ultimate goal. Once this game started tempting with how good it could be to string together a player’s bravura moments along a seemingly penetrable path, it was pretty much over. I became a part of Samus’s story, told in an eclipse of actions—my actions—leading the way to a showdown against the Mother Brain.
One could say that seeing undiscovered parts of a game’s world is Metroid’s defining pleasure; it might even be what this series of video games does best. The game’s world that players can see is extensive enough. The world that isn’t shown, as in Super Metroid, might be even more formidable. And yet, one can be sure that there are more crannies and secret rooms in either of these cases than brains can readily conceive. And since the original Metroid went to all these lengths to hide its power-ups and give its players eureka moments of finding them, it’s hard not to think that picking up secret stuff is what playing a Metroid game is all about.
The amazing excitement of finding my very first secret passage is something I will always remember. It happened in Brinstar, the game at the time making very clear through how it used visuals and how it sounded that the subterranean structure I had opened up was of great importance. And, wouldn’t as a kid, I translated that importance to egads, this must be an awesome space station! And with my powerful-arm-cannon gift that seems to take up 50 percent of the present of whatever awesome something I’m unwrapping, I look for something new to shoot with green or red in every 15 minutes.
Planet Zebes’s intricate map became my inseparable comrade, my very muse. I’d sketch studiously and map every bit of the world story inside… always looking for those annoying choke points of impediment. My passion for obsessive mapping expanded my appreciation for games with similar components, from the linearity of a Final Fantasy world map to the twisting and incredulous air ducts of Arkham Asylum. I have discovered an artistry in world design, and this is what incited my hysteria for the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2 and its purportedly seamless open world.
The world of Metroid isn’t just a static panorama; it’s a vital, dynamic organism that makes demands of the player. This is not the original game; it’s a reimagining, and the creators were willing to push record-setting technology to its structural limits to convey what they wanted in every corridor, every square room, every vertical shaft, every bomb-laden puzzle. My love of Metroid comes from its demand for progress in every possible way and from the fact that it takes me prospecting and makes me put some work into growing up to become something more.
What made Metroid unique was its mood, its electric tranquillity. From the first steps I took on Planet Zebes, I was filled with an incredibly thick sensation of solitude. There were no amiable Non-Player Characters to furnish me with undertakings or instructions. No cities bustled with the excesses and diversions of ordinary, between-mission urban life. And because Zebes was a singularly hostile, labyrinthine sump of a world, there were also no safe havens. The sum of my “just-me” existence on Zebes and the experience of playing Metroid must’ve been exquisitely unpleasant in its loneliness if not for the strangeness, the incongruous charm of Planet Zebes itself, and, of course, the eerie monotony of the game’s score.
In Metroid, the music was very different from anything I’d heard in other video games. It really was spooky, which was a word I preferred to use as a child, because haunting and the even stronger “haunted” imply, well, I think, some sort of “realness.” I played that game intensely, from the early morning, sometimes noon, until the night. My mom’s favorite story to tell is of when I got a Metroid cartridge for my Nintendo Entertainment System for my twelfth birthday.
Although they are primitive compared to today’s graphics, the graphics in Super Metroid are incredibly effective at conveying the profound alien-ness of the world Samus Aran is exploring. The art and science of this game drew me, and I suspect many others, deep into the totally not-of-this-Earth environment of Planet Zebes (not to be confused with the desert city of Turbo, also a Donkey). The environments aren’t Earth-like in the boring sense we get from today’s Earth-based military shooters; “real” isn’t “terra firma” and never an ocean wave mediated by a marine rendered in painstaking detail mostly from the hair up. Instead, each area Samus goes to is an alien terra world after another, yet still with no terra firma waves that look like ours. Worlds much more science fiction-y than our completely boring-ass military shooters of today tend to be.
Some of the most unforgettable moments in the game Metroid occur when the player comes across the alien Chozo statues. These statues, carved from a common material found on the eerie planet of Zebes, are one-of-a-kind, and when the player finds one, it is usually an occasion for awe and marvel. They aren’t just there to serve the story, either—when a player finds a Chozo statue, it gives her a power-up that lets her do something new that helps her to advance in the game.
The main charms of Metroid were exploration and atmosphere, but the achievement factor also cannot be ignored—that factor was always there for me in the original NES game. The original Metroid was a difficult game. It was unforgiving. It was also a very fair game. And fair doesn’t have to mean “nice.” Samus is a tough character, but her toughness is less about her physical appearance and her arms than it is about our ability to take control of her successfully.
Metroid’s controls were sharp and snappy, so much so that even very young players found Samus very easy to manipulate. The game then took these wildcats and sheathed them in an exoskeleton with an awesome, unfolding, internal game space. Besides the right-to-left or left-to-right side-scrolling screens, “rooms” that led up and down or down and up were also part of the way Metroid and Samus rolled, so you always had to be thinking in three dimensions. This made mapping the space in your head an extra, deliciously twisted task, like you were riding on the back end of a coiled spring.
In Metroid, going head-to-head against the game’s bosses makes for some really intense—and flat-out memorable—fights. You can trust that each of these bad guys will provide a distinct and hefty challenge, and almost all of them do (we “all” do talk about the near-disaster that is the Mother Brain fight some other day, of course). Skill, endurance, and a razor-sharp mind for when not to take the straight-on approach to a fight are all what are on tap here. Beating these bosses is like beating the game within the game. I’ve never felt the level of elation that comes from a Metroid boss takedown quite the same as in any other game.
When Metroid came out, the final boss battle was one of the most memorable parts of the game. To get there was a tough undertaking, with many different powerful enemies and perilous terrain, all leading to one of the toughest boss fights in the game. All of that was made ten times tougher for my character, who was a woman underneath the armor, which was a well-kept secret revealed at the end of the game after the player defeats the boss. What they did next was even more impressive, and what set Metroid apart from the endless run of good guy-bad guy space opera narratives.
Looking back at the time I spent playing Metroid, it’s immediately clear that the game had a profound and lasting impact. This wasn’t just a game to me; it was an undertaking—an experience that felt almost like real-life discovery and growth. By playing this game, I was exploring the limits of what a game could be, especially with the intent of making the most out of one’s experience without resorting to the number of lives one had left. This, to me, was the true essence of gaming, and Metroid had captured it in the most exquisite way.
Metroid’s original game has begotten a significant lineage. Its offspring have not strayed from its essential components but have instead dressed them up in various ways that we find just as beguiling now as in 1986. Those games extended the frontiers of play with mechanics that made them feel fresh. Some shit happened in Super Metroid, and that game is bound to scare you, or at least make you very uncomfortable at times. It isn’t alone. Play Metroid II: The Return of Samus for the banter, for the buildup, for the agonizing situations into which the game’s designers draw you.
In particular, Super Metroid is a tour de force of game design. The original game’s ideas were not only preserved in Super Metroid, they were enhanced and given room to breathe in every cavern and cantilevered space of tiny latticework platforms. The Super Metroid research station has sharper edges and tighter corners than the pixelated platforms that the first games in the series played on. The final product is a game that appeared, at that moment, to just about be perfect—and a large fraction of players these days would more or less agree with that appearance.
The Metroid series took a groundbreaking turn with the release of Metroid Prime, which brought a third dimension to the beloved side-scrolling action of the original games and their direct sequels. Much as in the original games, the hero, Samus Aran, moves through a series of alien chambers and tunnels. Here, though, they’re rendered in 3D—a first for the series. And in the original game’s spirit of free exploration, Samus was still able to return to previously visited rooms in order to achieve 100% completion. The player sought—and sometimes found many times over—a path that led from tunnels to a series of rooms, and from there to further series of rooms.
The Metroid series has left an impressive mark on the game design of many titles that have come in its wake. A whole subgenre of games, referred to as Metroidvania, combines exploration, platforming, and non-linear gameplay, and is seen as being inspired almost in its entirety by the Metroid series. Some popular examples of Metroidvania games are Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Axiom Verge. Yet all of these games have something of their own to offer and are not just paying homage to Metroid. They’re part of a legacy.
Investigating the enigmas of Metroid was like going on an archeological dig into the ruins of an incredibly advanced and mysterious ancient civilization. Each discovery I made in the game served to heighten the sense of wonder and danger that radiated from the hollowed-out skeleton of a once-thriving underground base on Planet Zebes.
Metroid is much more than a simple game. It stands as a powerful demonstration of storytelling and gameplay. The narrative is minimal in Metroid, but the key stuff is alluded to through environmental clues. And certainly, the affection us gamers feel for Samus Aran is very much about her as a well-established character in the history of video games. In sum, then, Metroid offers some of gaming’s most potent history and character stuff.
Metroid’s rich history lives on in its main series, as well as in the games outside of it that have been influenced by its iconic design. And by the time “Metroid Prime” was released, that rich history was already firmly in place. The 2002 GameCube game just helped to launch the series into its third decade of life, to shift its original 1986 Famicom legacy from an 8-bit, two-dimensional past into a 3D future, and, without a doubt, to give the series a new vibrant lease on life that soon unraveled into a string of canonical and non-canonical experiences on the Wii and Wii U that, one by one, were fully worth living through or serving as curiosities to dissect.
To Metroid, a series that has held me in its thrall and filled me with inspiration for many, many years: Thank you. Thank you for the endless adventures, the intense difficulty, and the currently unsolvable mysteries. And to all who have traveled in that world with me and will in the future, we’ll always find our way back there because we’re part of Samus’s world. Discoveries will always be made. And the intensity and also the sacred amount of death will guarantee one hell of a good time.
