Retro Studios on Metroid Prime 3 Development

Now that you're enjoying Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in the comfort of your home, maybe you should know just how hard it was for Retro Studios to deliver a good looking, trilogy-ending, smooth-controlling fast-paced, tenth installment of a popular game series that blessed our childhood. Thus, Retro Studios Game Director, Mark Pacini, has revealed a few details about the game's development process during the 2007 Montreal Games Summit.

Here's a couple of highlights from what Gamasutra managed to gather as information (via 1UP.com): "We used Super Metroid as our kind of Bible. But as we'd been sold on the concept of [Metroid Prime being] first-person; we couldn't see how to put the ball into the title. In fact, it was actually on the chopping block for a long time. We thought that concentrating on the exploration through platforming might be good enough," said Mark Pacini.

However, as the above-mentioned sources pointed out, Shigeru Miyamoto has been quite picky about the project (in a good way that is) and didn't give the studios a green light to move forward with developing the game until they could present him with a perfect solution for the player to switch between first-person Samus and Samus as the morph ball (in third-person). This is just a mere example of what the studio had to focus on for a few months:

"It took us a few months to get that correct," said Pacini. "And that was pretty scary, as it was one of the first milestones we had to reach, and thanks to our engineers, we managed to create something that when Miyamoto saw it he said, 'okay' on the project. That was huge."

We imagine it was. It's not every day that Miyamoto comes up to folks saying: Right! You've done a good job here and I'm proud of you. Carry on, carry on...