Jan 3
Retro Studios on Working With Nintendo
Interviews with the guys behind the Metroid Prime series, Retro Studios, are few and far between so when one like Next-Gen just did comes along I always jump at the chance to read it. I’ve been constantly impressed by how well the studio translated a 2D game into 3D and am always blown away by the level of quality in the Prime series. The far too short interview gives some pretty good insight into what working with Nintendo is like with game director Mark Pacini saying,
They hammer the game from every possible angle. It can be literally as small as moving a box one centimeter to the left. They can spot these little details that are so important to game flow.
Sounds pretty precise but I guess this explains why most Nintendo games (a) come out so well and (b) get delayed five times over. Moving every box a centimeter takes a lot of time. Sadly Next-Gen didn’t ask Retro about what their next project was going to be other than to mention that they won’t be working on a Metroid game in the foreseeable future. For a bit of discussion on working with the Wii remote and some other game design choices check out the full interview at Next-Gen.
Categories: Interviews, Nintendo, Shooter2 Comments so far
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I’m sure they didn’t ask the question because they knew they wouldn’t get an answer.
Another company you hear about their attention to detail like this is Valve.
“The mistake we made in Metroid Prime 2 was that we made the whole game far too difficult. For Corruption we re-evaluated and moved back to the true Metroid philosophy.”
How true. Prime 2 was really tough, even before you jumped in difficulty. Exploration was stifled because you were afraid of simply dying (damned dark world); many players don’t think of design choices such as this. More often that not, they’re struck with featuritis and wonder what new gimmick will twist their crank in an overall ’samey’ game (”oh boy, there’s a cover mechanic now!”).