Metroid Prime The 20th anniversary is fast approaching, and even without a remake announcement, the developers of the original have at least shared some cool secrets.
Those of us who remember Metroid Prime coming out may have been reduced to ashes from the first sentence (not me, I don’t remember, sorry to all who did), but yes, Metroid Prime is coming next week on 11 20 years old on the 18th. On this occasion, programmer Zoid Kirsch decided to share some game secrets you may not know starting on November 18th, and plans to continue sharing some secrets every day until the anniversary.
The first fact he shares is one that probably won’t surprise you. Those long door opening sequences? Yep, it’s just that the rooms take time to load. Kirsch explained that up to two rooms can be loaded at a time, and explained why rooms with multiple exits can only have one door open at a time.
Metroid Prime’s 20th anniversary is November 18th. Every day until then, I’ll be tweeting a little story about its development. This is the first one:
— Zoid Kirsch (@ZoidCTF) November 8, 2022
One of the cooler facts is about an effect in the game whereby whenever Samus gets close to the Pulse Bombu, her visor fills with noise, blocking her vision. Kirsch pointed out that since the GameCube only has 24mb of RAM, “each texture [had] Think carefully. ”
Kirsch points out that using low-res textures to save memory just makes statics look blurry, not as sharp as you’d like. So how do they achieve the effect? An engineer came up with the idea of using the memory containing the Metroid Prime code itself, which honestly has so many rules.
“While you see Samus’ visor affected by electronic ‘noise’ in the game, what you’re actually seeing are the bits and bytes of the Metroid Prime software code itself rendered on screen,” Kirsch wrote. “The resulting machine code is random enough to work well as a static noise texture!”
Head over to Kirch’s Twitter for more facts, because it’s always a treat to get such a rare insight into a Nintendo game in particular.
Of course, we are still waiting for more on Metroid Prime 4 (still in development), but most likely we’ll have to keep waiting for the game.
If we use low-res textures (64×64) to save memory, the “statics” will be blurry and unsharp. One of the engineers on the team came up with a great idea: what if we only used the memory that holds the Metroid Prime code itself! We gave it a quick try and it looked great.
— Zoid Kirsch (@ZoidCTF) November 8, 2022
