LOS ANGELES — When Nintendo needed a development team to handle one of its few hard-core game properties, it knew where to turn: ninjas.
In what was easily the most surprising announcement of this year's E3, the game company said it had tapped the developer of the Ninja Gaiden series of ultraviolent action games to produce a radical new take on one of Nintendo's classic series. Metroid: Other M, slated for release on Wii in 2010, will add a deeper storyline to the stoic series of outer-space action games, going further into the back story of its heroine, galaxy-traveling bounty hunter Samus Aran.
See also:
Top 10 Game Trailers From E3
Q&A: Yoshio Sakamoto and Yousuke Hayashi
It's the latest twist on a series with a convoluted development history. After 1994's critically lauded Super Metroid, the series went dark before being resurrected in 2002 with a first-person shooter called Metroid Prime and a Game Boy title, Metroid Fusion.
Other M, says Nintendo's Yoshio Sakamoto, represents a second rebirth of the series, one that he hopes will be "the ultimate Metroid experience," one that differs greatly from the first-person shooters.
"The story I want to tell with Other M can't be achieved with that approach," he says.
The Metroid series is Sakamoto's baby. As one of the first game designers hired by Nintendo (he worked with Shigeru Miyamoto on Donkey Kong Jr.), Sakamoto directed the original 8-bit Metroid game in 1986. It was notable at the time for its nonlinear exploration, striking graphics and atmospheric music — and also for the revelation at game's end that masked hero Samus Aran was actually a flaxen-haired woman.
Sakamoto didn't have anything to do with the Metroid Prime games, which were developed in Austin, Texas. But in 2006, with the third Prime game already under way for Wii, Sakamoto says he began to think of a different sort of Metroid game that delved deeper into Samus' history.
"One of my goals is to present Samus as an appealing human character, and that involves explaining a little bit about what happened in her past as well as the characters that influenced her," Sakamoto says.
Just one problem: Sakamoto didn't have a development team with the know-how or experience to bring his vision to life. His group at Nintendo produces quirky 2-D portable games like Rhythm Heaven and WarioWare, not 3-D action games with massive production values.
"I realized that I'd probably need to find a partner, someone to collaborate with in making my concepts a reality," Sakamoto said. "Someone who not only understood my concept as it existed, but would also be able to contribute based on their own experience to what I had in mind."
Sakamoto found that partner in the unlikeliest of places: Team Ninja, the development group inside Japanese publisher Tecmo responsible for the company's biggest hit series. Last year's Ninja Gaiden II was at best an uneven game, but Team Ninja's programmers and designers clearly had the high-def technical chops that Sakamoto's team didn't.
They were also eager to work with one of gaming's most legendary worlds.
"While we do have a lot of experience creating action games for the core audience, when Mr. Sakamoto approached me with his project, I thought this would be an excellent new challenge for my team to take on as well," says Team Ninja leader Yousuke Hayashi.
"It's not our goal to make a Team Ninja version of Metroid," Hayashi says. "It's our goal not just to make a game that appeals to Metroid fans or fans of Team Ninja games. It should be a game for everyone."
Neither Hayashi nor Sakamoto, however, are saying a word about what, exactly, the vision is. We can glean some insight from the game's trailer: Besides the story scenes that will give us a deeper dive into the character of Samus Aran, the gameplay of Metroid: Other M will jump between a few different styles. You'll be exploring the world with the traditional side-on, third-person 2-D camera view (pictured top). But the game will also occasionally jump into first-person, perhaps for fights against larger enemies.
Apart from that, everyone's lips are sealed. Sakamoto would only say that the game's storyline is set between Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion.
At Nintendo, Sakamoto says that he and three other "key people" from the Metroid staff are overseeing development. The rest of the game's 100-plus-person team is split between Team Ninja and a company called D-Rockets, which is producing the cinematic scenes.
Metroid: Other M will be the first game produced by Team Ninja since the acrimonious departure of its former leader Tomonobu Itagaki, whose name had been synonymous with the series. As the new team leader, Hayashi says it is his charge to maintain the team's reputation for stylish action.
"I think within the entire Nintendo universe, I have a responsibility to make Metroid the most beautiful, not only in terms of graphics but in game design," Hayashi says.
See Also:
