Metroid

Metroid is an action-adventure video game franchise created by Nintendo, centered on the bounty hunter Samus Aran and her campaign against the Space Pirates and the parasitic Metroid creatures they seek to harness.¹⁶ Combining side-scrolling platforming with labyrinthine, nonlinear exploration in a science-fiction setting, the series is often ranked with Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda as one of Nintendo’s three foundational first-party franchises.¹³ The original game debuted in Japan in 1986 and has grown through more than a dozen entries across three decades, spanning 2D side-scrollers and 3D first-person adventures.³¹⁴

Origins and the first game

In 1986, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto commissioned creators at Nintendo R&D1? and Intelligent Systems to build an action game that combined the side-scrolling platforming of Super Mario Bros. with the labyrinthine exploration of The Legend of Zelda.¹² The game was produced by Gunpei Yokoi, whose R&D1 team sought to launch a franchise equal to Miyamoto’s.¹⁹ Yokoi assigned three men to the project: Makoto Kanoh created the characters and scenario, Hiroji Kiyotake designed Samus and the bosses Ridley, Kraid, and Mother Brain, and Yoshio Sakamoto directed.⁹

Metroid first appeared on the Famicom Disk System in Japan, released on August 6, 1986; a slightly simplified version reached North America for the Nintendo Entertainment System the following year without the Disk System’s features.⁹¹³ The disk medium’s rewritable storage and 128K capacity allowed the game its three save slots, making a long adventure that could take hours to complete feasible.⁹ The plot casts the player as Samus Aran, dispatched to the planet Zebes to destroy the supercomputer Mother Brain and stop the Space Pirates from weaponizing the Metroids, life-draining alien creatures invulnerable to most conventional weapons.¹¹⁴

Exploration was the game’s central mechanic: despite its left-to-right scrolling format, the player’s first task is to move left to collect the Morph Ball, which lets Samus collapse into a sphere and roll through tight passages.¹⁹ Areas scrolled either horizontally or vertically but never both, and the world was built from a limited set of repeated pieces to conserve cartridge memory, a constraint that made careful mapping essential.¹³ Players progressed by finding weapons and power-ups, many of them required to reach new areas, in a design widely compared to that of The Legend of Zelda.³¹³

The reveal and Alien’s influence

Director Yoshio Sakamoto cited Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien as a major source of inspiration, shaping creature and level design, the atmospheric music, and the twist that Samus is a woman — a parallel to Ellen Ripley as the true survivor of Alien.¹⁹ Sakamoto recalled that the idea arose mid-development when a staff member suggested it would be cool if the figure inside the suit turned out to be a woman.⁹ Elements of the film’s influence recur throughout: the Metroids function like facehuggers, Samus’s nemesis Ridley echoes a xenomorph, and the Chozo statues resemble the film’s precursor beings.¹

Metroid concealed Samus’s gender throughout the first game, its instruction booklet referring to the hero as “he”.⁹¹³ The ending changed with the player’s completion time, and finishing in under a certain span rewarded players with the reveal that the armored hero was a human woman; those who beat the game in two hours or less saw her remove her suit.¹⁹ CBR characterizes the reveal as partly a marketing decision, reflecting uncertainty at Nintendo that an action game could be carried by a female protagonist.¹ The choice made Samus one of gaming’s earliest major female leads, and IGN has called her role probably the first major starring role for a woman in a video game.¹⁰ The mechanic of tying the ending to completion time also helped establish the practice of speedrunning.¹

The soundtrack, composed by Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, stood apart from the upbeat music of contemporaneous 8-bit games as a moody, atmospheric score suited to the alien setting.⁶ Tanaka said he wanted players to feel as if they were encountering a living creature, blurring the distinction between music and sound effects.⁶

Sequels and the leap to 3D

A sequel did not arrive for five years.⁹ Metroid II: Return of Samus followed on the Game Boy in 1992, sending Samus to the Metroids’ home planet SR388 to exterminate the species; it retained the series’ exploration-intensive design and multiple endings tied to completion time.³¹⁴¹⁰ Super Metroid reached the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1994 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest games ever made, using Mode 7 effects to bring its level designs to life.³ In it, the Metroid hatchling Samus brought back from SR388 is stolen by Ridley and taken to a rebuilt Space Pirate hideout on Zebes.¹⁴

The series made the transition to three dimensions with Metroid Prime, a first-person GameCube game released in 2002.³ Although fans feared the shift from 2D side-scroller to first-person shooter would compromise the series, Prime and its sequel Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004) were received as worthwhile continuations.³ Reviewers noted that in the Prime games Samus’s arm-mounted cannon serves more as a means of progression than a weapon — missiles open doors, bombs clear blockages — and that the true obstacle is the vast terrain rather than the alien enemies.⁴ The Prime trilogy’s scan visor and atmospheric environmental design gave the environment an integral role rarely seen in other shooters.⁴

Later entries expanded the story and experimented with format: Metroid Fusion (2002) introduced the parasitic X and Metroid: Zero Mission (2004) remade the original with an added chapter.¹⁴ The series also produced spin-offs including Metroid Prime Pinball (2005), the multiplayer-focused Metroid Prime: Federation Force (2016), and the divisive Metroid: Other M.¹⁴¹⁹ Metroid: Samus Returns (2017) remade Metroid II for the Nintendo 3DS, and Metroid Dread launched on the Nintendo Switch on October 8, 2021, arriving 19 years after Metroid Fusion as a sequel in the timeline.¹⁴¹⁸ Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, developed by Retro Studios, was announced at E3 2017, restarted in January 2019, and re-unveiled in a Nintendo Direct on June 18, 2024.¹⁴

Legacy and the Metroidvania genre

Metroid’s fusion of platforming, nonlinear exploration, and upgrade-gated progression proved so influential that it gave its name to a subgenre: the Metroidvania, in which players navigate a sprawling labyrinth, collecting items across the map to unlock new areas.¹¹³ The term joins Metroid to Konami’s Castlevania, and commentators point in particular to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which abandoned the linear structure of earlier Castlevania games for an open, fully explorable castle.¹¹³ Other accounts trace the naming to the second Castlevania game, Simon’s Quest.¹³

The series’ design has since shaped a broad range of games — CBR cites Batman: Arkham Asylum, Carrion, and Doom Eternal as titles that adopt complex maps encouraging exploration for upgrades, artifacts, and world-building notes.¹ Despite this influence and comparisons to Nintendo’s other flagship series, Metroid has often been regarded as the more overlooked of the company’s foundational franchises.¹³