Metroid (NES)

METROID メトロイド ©1986 Nintendo Version: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Publisher: NINTENDO CO., LTD. Production: Nintendo Research & Development 1 Division Development: NINTENDO CO., LTD. Additional Work: INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS CO., LTD. (Program)

Producer: Gunpei Yokoi Director: Satoru Okada Masao Yamamoto Design: Makoto Kano Hiroji Kiyotake Hirofumi Matsuoka Yoshio Sakamoto Program: Hiroyuki Yukami Yase Sobajima Toshio Sengoku N. Shiotani M. Hosokowa Toru Narihiro Kenji Nishizawa Music / Sound: Hirokazu Tanaka Special Thanks: Toru Osawa M. Goyake Takahiro Harada Executive Producer: Hiroshi Yamauchi

Development Notes: Following the success of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., the Nintendo R&D1 team that previously developed arcade like titles, began working on their own larger scale "action game". Planning and design were originally lead by Hirofumi Matsuoka and Hiroji Kiyotake, who managed to create a game taking place in outer space with a fast moving and jumping character. The production was described as a "very free working environment" by Hirokazu Tanaka, who was in charge of the music and sound, but also contributed ideas to the overall development. Partially through development, one of the developers asked the others, "Hey, wouldn't that be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?" This idea was incorporated into the game, and revealed during the ending as a surprise to players. While much of the ground work was created by the original team, development struggled, and the team began to pull resources from other titles, most notably Yoshio Sakamoto was asked to join the team. While Sakamoto credits himself as co-creator alongside the original lead planners, he was pivotal in redesigning the map and shifting the mechanics from straight forward action to item based exploration. Sakamoto also injected much of his influences into the lore and world design of the game. Ridley Scott's 1979 horror film Alien was described by Sakamoto as a "huge influence" after the game's world had been created. The development staff was also inspired by the work of the film's creature designer H. R. Giger, and found his creations to be fitting for the theme. While concept, visual design, and audio were handled by Nintendo R&D1 - the programming duties were subcontracted to Intelligent Systems, who was one of the many technology contractors that Nintendo partnered for hardware and consignment game programming during that era. While the original version was release on the Famicom Disk System, the NES version was slightly different, and also featured a password system created by Kenji Nishizawa of Nintendo R&D1.

Staff Credits: Link Staff Interview: None Sales Data: Link

INFOBOX
Version: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
Source: KRIRM. Nintendo JP. Sakamoto Interview: Wired.com.
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