How 40 Years of Metroid Have Impacted The Biggest Metroidvania Developers

Metroid’s impact on the industry is widespread enough to have a whole genre named after it. It’s a privilege it splits with Castlevania, but it’s an honor all the same: a rarity shared by the likes of Rogue and Demon’s Souls. This seminal 1986 NES title helped spawn an entire style of game and influenced many creators across the industry.

GameSpot spoke to various developers behind a number of modern metroidvanias to get their input on the Metroid series and how it has impacted the games they have made.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Rémi Boutin, senior game designer on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

I discovered Metroid through Super Metroid, and apart from the alien atmosphere, the amazing Samus Aran, and the unforgettable intro, what immediately struck me was its interconnected world. At the time, I was playing a lot of level-based games, and having this huge, hostile maze to explore, full of mysteries and secrets to uncover, was incredible. It conveyed a thrill of adventure that I had rarely experienced before, except perhaps with Zelda.

For me, this is the heart of the Metroid experience: exploring a world, then making it your own. Samus becomes stronger through upgrades, but players also become better through their knowledge of the world and their mastery of its rules. Shattering the glass tube in Brinstar with a Power Bomb after passing through it many times (and seeing another smashed tube) remains one of my most memorable gaming moments.

This process of mastering the world was a major inspiration for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. We knew some players struggled to remember places they needed to revisit and we wanted to preserve their autonomy without letting them feel lost. Our solution is to let players “annotate” the map with screenshots to mark places to revisit later. I hope it gives players the same pleasure of exploration I felt when I first explored Zebes.

Marc-A. Jean, artist on Infernax

Infernax

You know a game is special when, years later, you can still remember all the little details surrounding the first time you played it. It was August 1994, I was 11, and my brother and I had just spent all our hard-earned money on Super Metroid. It had been a beautiful summer day, and as the sun was setting, we turned on the SNES and holy hell, this game went hard right from the start! The eerie opening, the music, Ceres Station, the return to a sleeping Zebes under the rain… We played until bedtime, and I couldn't sleep that night. I could still hear Brinstar's haunting music in my head while thinking about the game. I was completely hooked. From discovering Wall Jumps and Shinesparks to the Baby Metroid's sacrifice and the final battle with Mother Brain, the journey was unforgettable. To this day, Super Metroid remains one of the greatest games I've ever played.

The biggest influence definitely comes from an emotional standpoint: How can I make the player feel what I intend them to feel? The same way Super Metroid got me to obsess over its atmosphere, the original Metroid got me hyped up for a juicy power up every time I heard its distinctive item room music, and Fusion captivated me with its story and the fear of the SA-X. I try my best to pay special attention to the little details that give a game an emotional impact and leave a lasting impression on the player.

Thierry Boulanger, game director, designer, and writer on The Messenger

The Messenger

My love for Metroid happened very slowly at first, and then extremely fast. I had the original on NES, but I was only 6 years old, so it mostly landed as a confusing and unnerving experience. I'd play it for a few minutes from time to time, just until the eeriness ended up getting the better of me. I think I just needed to be a bit older, because about a year later it all clicked. Before me was a very unique kind of experience, a genuine sense of being all alone, and impossibly far away, in a world filled with countless mysteries and intricacies. While I've enjoyed new installments throughout the years, the original Metroid on NES is the one I keep going back to. But then, isn't the best installment in a series always whichever one you happened to play in your formative years?

During these formative years in elementary school, I was so obsessed with Metroid on NES that it led to an early ‘90s kid hustle. Stumbling upon my first Red Door, the mystery overwhelmed me and I spent almost two hours shooting at it. Then I remembered a friend had an NES Advantage arcade stick, but his price for borrowing it was $2, which I did not have to my name. At my grandparents' house over the weekend, I opened up about this insurmountable situation and was able to get myself a whole $2 bill by picking gooseberries for them.

I could barely sleep that night, overwhelmed by visions of the Red Door opening, and the anticipation of what lay beyond. A few days later, I plugged in the NES Advantage and tucked it under the ottoman so the turbo button would stay firmly pressed all night. You can imagine my disappointment the next morning when I turned on the CRT TV and heard the telling "ding" sound effect in the speakers before the image even came on. It took me several months to find the missiles, during which time I still believed the door just might open with enough shots. In fact, part of me still believes…

Maxine Martinez, texture artist and level designer on Pseudoregalia and animator, environmental artist, level designer, and concept designer on Vernal Edge

Vernal Edge

Metroid is such a great inspiration partly because it's a series with a lot of diverse entries. Super Metroid is a staple of diverse routing and replay value, the Prime series is made up of some of the most beautiful and atmospheric 3D games ever made, and Game Boy Advance entries like Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission have a pristine 2D game feel. It's hard not to feel inspired in some way when you're going through the catalogue!

I think going through games I've released and future projects you'll most feel the influence of Super Metroid's Wall Jump and Shinespark. Both are initially obscure tools the game teaches you about much later than when you first obtain them (thanks, animals) and change your relationship with the environment. The Wall Jump shatters the game's illusion of a fixed progression, making replays exciting and encouraging tightly timed tricky jumps to push you into new areas. The Shinespark takes previously innocuous terrain like slopes and long runways and turns them into new opportunities to create intricate Shinespark chains leading to collectables or making re-traversal faster and more fun.

The way these basic tools interact with common collision and evolve your relationship with the game is something I'm always looking to mimic in my games and is part of why I'm so addicted to level design and platforming. I suspect everyone has something unique that inspires them about the Metroid series because it excels in so many different fields and is always trailblazing!

Thomas Happ, sole developer of Axiom Verge and Axiom Verge 2

Axiom Verge

Metroid has had a special place in my heart ever since I first played it on NES in elementary school. I didn't actually own it; the friend I borrowed it from thought it was boring. But I loved it, especially after learning how to bomb jump and use the wall walking trick. So I borrowed it from that same friend over and over, since, again, he didn't like it.

It's hard for me to explain this, but I think whatever was going on in my mind wasn't quite what was going on in other kid's minds. I felt like there might be a whole hidden world inside there, and I spent way too long trying to find it. It was such a unique feeling that I don't think I've experienced anything like that since then, and I've always been trying to chase that down. Of course I liked the game on its own, as well as Super Metroid and most of the sequels (especially Prime), but that unintentional meta aspect is what started the spiral, I think.

Chris Harvey, technical director on Guacamelee and Guacamelee 2

Guacamelee!

Exploring an interconnected world, acquiring an ability that recontextualizes how you interact with that world, and returning to familiar places to push deeper into hidden locations--that loop creates a “Eureka!” feeling unique to video games. Other NES-era titles had pieces of the formula, but Metroid brought it all together in a way that made you desperately want to explore and discover.

As a kid, though, the original NES game was brutally hard and simply impossible to finish. That’s why everyone at school somehow knew the "JUSTIN BAILEY" password, using it as our lifeline to see deeper into the game. Years later, I was at a friend's house playing the original game, and after a grueling fight we finally defeated Mother Brain. We erupted into cheers. My friend’s older sister mocked us mercilessly for how ridiculous we were being, but we didn't care. She had no idea how incredible that victory felt to us.

By the late 2000s, Nintendo had put Metroid on hold, and Konami had moved away from its Metroid-like Castlevania games. When Shadow Complex hit Xbox Live Arcade in 2009, it reminded me how much I loved that game structure and left me wondering, "Why isn't this being used more? I would love to make a game like this.” That question helped inspire us to make Guacamelee, which is our most explicit love letter to Metroid's design.

But the series' influence didn't stop there. The core concept of gear-gating is a fundamental part of Drinkbox's DNA. You can feel that influence running through other games of ours, like Severed and Nobody Saves the World. That mechanical magic is one of the most rewarding feelings.

James Montagna, assistant director on Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

Long before creating games at WayForward, I grew up playing titles like Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and, really, the whole series! First, it was purely as a player for the joy of it, and then later as a designer I studied how those games teach and guide so naturally. To me, the Metroid games do both at the same time.

What's fun is how present Metroid is in our day-to-day at WayForward. When we're building in this genre, the team constantly references those Nintendo classics with things like "Super Metroid does it this way." It's become a shared language, and a shorthand that instantly puts everyone on the same page. That's a testament to the work of the original teams: 40 years later, these games are just as much an inspiration as they are vocabulary.

James Petruzzi, designer, director and writer on Chasm and designer, director, and programmer on Wolfhound

Chasm

I was about six or seven years old the first time I heard of Metroid. My neighbor bought the game, and I thought it was very strange from the start. The name was bizarre, the atmosphere was impenetrable, and the gameplay was tough and unforgiving. Coming from bright and cheerful platformers like Mario where you could only go one direction, it was like whiplash diving into Metroid's dark maze of a world. It was too tough for me at that time, especially without a map or guide, but later on in life I came back to it and my appreciation grew greatly for what they were able to achieve in an 8-bit game. The brooding atmosphere, close-quarters gun combat, and power-up system were all masterfully executed and have inspired countless games since.

For my next game, Wolfhound, I wanted to go back to the roots of the genre and figure out what really made it tick. While most Metroidvania games have gone down the RPG path with tons of items, characters, sidequests, mechanics, and skill trees, I found myself drawn back to the elegant simplicity of Metroid and Super Metroid. The key ingredients I found were a large, dark world that feels indifferent to your presence, a tricky maze to navigate and conquer by finding key items that also increase your range of movements or attacks, and tight combat and platforming to tie it all together. I'm doing my best to design Wolfhound around those core pillars, and not give in to overstuffing the world and ultimately detracting from the atmosphere.

Kyle Thompson, artist, programmer, and designer on Sheepo, Islets, and Crypt Custodian

Islets

I grew up playing freeware PC games that were inspired by the Metroid series (An Untitled Story, Knytt Stories, Infection by Shawn64), but I hadn't actually played any games in the franchise until I was an adult and making games of my own. I started with Super Metroid and loved it. I think the aspect of it that I found most inspiring was the way it was able to capture this feeling of dread and isolation. There is very little text or dialogue or direct storytelling, but the world feels like it has so much depth to it.

Yarden Weissbrot, game designer, narrative designer, animator, and artist on Grime and Grime II

Grime

Metroid was a pioneer of ability gating and may just be the game that ultimately popularized it. This one aspect alone is integral to the Metroidvania genre, making exploration feel so magical and rewarding. But I bet that’s going to be something plenty of developers are going to bring up, so I’ll get more specific with a Metroid game that helped influence my most recent development work.

For me, Metroid Dread specifically was the first game that showed me what a high production value Metroidvania could look like. The animations and how they complemented the quick movements, along with the camera shifts during combat and parries, all served as a sort of blueprint for me as I was working on Grime II. I went frame by frame, trying to figure out what made the movement so appealing. I started by trying to incorporate more cutscenes that zoomed into the character mid-gameplay, like in Dread, but that proved to be a tad too ambitious for our small team of six!

I obviously didn’t match their quality level, but learning from them ultimately made our game’s presentation far better than it otherwise would have been.

James Deighan, CEO of Mega Cat Studios, developer of God of War Sons of Sparta

God of War: Sons of Sparta

My way into Metroid was backwards. My favorite metroidvania of all time is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I've replayed it on every platform I could get my hands on, and it's one of those games that actually gets better with distance. SotN is what sent me hunting for everything else that scratched the same itch, and that's how I found my way back to Metroid and the rest of the Castlevania catalog. My appreciation for Metroid isn't nostalgia in the traditional sense where it was my introduction to the genre. It's tracing a genre back to its source and realizing the DNA was there the whole time in the Metroid and Castlevania franchises.

Across our core team, like many of our friends and c