The 1994 action-adventure Super Metroid is arguably the best entry in the mainline Metroid series and as a result, it’s inspired many other games over the years.
One game that you may not have realised took a little bit of inspiration is Valve’s 2011 puzzle-platform game is Portal 2. Speaking to Kiwi Talkz, the game’s project lead, Joshua Weier, mentioned how the game’s opening was directly inspired by Super Metroid and was used to overcome a small problem.
Here’s the full story:
“We had this problem in the game which was, if you just played portal we didn’t want to make you learn portals all again but at the same time if you’ve never played portal we had to teach you so it’s like okay how do we do this in a way that’s good for both and I was really inspired personally by Super Metroid. I always loved the way Super Metroid started out where it’s like you’re coming down to the planet and you’re going through, you’re kind of going through it backwards right, you’re like going through where mother brain is and doing all that stuff and you turn it on and everything comes back to life and that was really where i was like hey let’s do this. Let’s have you so you’re going back through the chambers but now they’re all derelict and they’re beat up and they’re not quite working and everything’s broken and so that gave us a way if you played the original game you’re like oh this is cool yeah um i know how to do this I’ll breeze right through it but i’m getting to see the the cool new setting and if you’d never play portal then you’re getting trained as well along the way.”
If this has got you in the mood for Portal, the good news is Valve recently announced the Portal: Companion Collection would be arriving on the Nintendo Switch at some point later this year. It will contain both Portal and Portal 2.
And if you’d like to relive Super Metroid, you can do this by signing up to the Switch Online service to access Nintendo’s retro SNES library.
Have you played Portal 2? Will you be picking it up on the Nintendo Switch? Leave a comment down below.
