Earlier this week, Michael Wikan – the former lead designer of all three Metroid Prime games – revealed on Facebook why he didn’t think a Switch port of the Metroid Prime Trilogy was likely to happen.
In short, he doubts it will be released, as Retro Studios no longer has “functional editor tools to work with the Prime code base” and as a result, everything would have to be “brute-force” hard coded. Metroid Prime 3 alone would apparently be a “herculean effort”.
Sadly, Wikan’s comments appear to have upset some people within the Metroid community, and the former Retro Studios developer is now apparently being targeted with abusive messages. This information was shared by the Metroid fan website Shinesparkers:
“We have been informed that the developer mentioned has been targeted with abusive messages directed at his personal account on social media. The Metroid community is better than this, please be kind.”
As highlighted by much more reasonable fans online, Wikan never actually said a trilogy release wouldn’t happen, he just said he was “pretty skeptical” and believes it would likely require a lot of hard work to make it happen – especially the third game.
These latest comments about the Metroid Prime Trilogy, follow on from years of rumours, Switch listings on retailer websites and insider predictions. Back in January 2019, Imran Khan – who was with Game Informer at the time – said the trilogy collection for Switch had been “long done” and Nintendo was just waiting for the right moment.
The fact Michael Wikan was a former lead designer on all three Metroid Prime games – no matter how long ago it was, means his comments are definitely worth taking into consideration.
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