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metroid

When Retro Studios started to work on their GameCube projects (as NFL Football, Raven Blade and Car Combat), one of the first concepts created in 1999 / 2000 was the one for this game, at that time simply know as “Action Adventure”. The player would have impersonate 3 females protagonists in an action game set in a alien / sci-fi world. When Nintendo came to Retro Studios to check for their progresses, most of their games were in a development hell, with few things done and lot of disorganization. Nintendo decided to cut most of Retro Studios’s projects to have them to concentrate on the development of Metroid Prime: Action Adventure was then cancelled and never seen again.

Probably there was not even a playable beta for Action Adventure (it was still unclear if it would have a third-person or a first-person view) and it seems that only few concept arts and some early tech demos (that you can see below) were made before it’s cancellation. Even if assets from Action Adventure were never re-used for Metroid Prime, the experience to design a similar concept was probably of some help for the successive work on Samu’s first-person adventure.

An interesting article on this project can be find at IGN

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Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Metroid Prime Hunters [DS – Beta]

U64 Staff & Contributors

08-04-2008

4 Comments

A highly prototypical demo, titled Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, was included as a pack-in (now discontinued) with the DS launch on November 21, 2004 in North America, Australia and Europe. This demo was not released in Japan. First Hunt had a different layout to the lower screen, and a slightly different weapon system. There was a different default control method, in which the screens were transposed, and targets could be fired upon by tapping them with the stylus regardless of whether they were centered in view. The control schemes found in the final version were also available. The Power Beam had no charge function, and it had an ammo system. When Power Beam ammo was exhausted, the rate of fire slowed greatly.

There was also a “Double Damage” pickup that caused Samus to cause twice as much damage with each shot (which reappeared in the multiplayer battles of the final version of the game) and only two sub-weapons, missiles and the “Electro Lob” (similar to the Volt Driver and Battlehammer, it lobs and explodes on impact but also can impair vision). Three training scenarios were present, as well as a multi-card multiplayer mode. Some of the multiplayer levels from Hunters were included in the demo. – [info from Wikipedia]

[Thanks to Michael Cheek for the contribute!]

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