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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