In shock news Nintendo has announced that work on Metroid Prime 4 has been reset and it’ll be years until its finished.
If you’re wondering why Nintendo still hasn’t shown off any footage from Metroid Prime 4 yet there’s a very good reason: producers are so dissatisfied with the work so far they’ve rebooted the whole project and switched developers.
In an unprecedented move, Nintendo EPD general manager Shinya Takahashi made the video below to explain that ‘the current development progress has not reach the standards we seek in a sequel to the Metroid Prime series’ and that ‘the game will not live up to our fans’ expectations’.
As a result, all work on the current version of the game will stop and it will be started again from scratch with Retro Studios, who made the original trilogy.
This will mean it’ll be a long time till anything is shown of the game and even longer till it’s actually out. A good quality game takes at least two to three years to make and can easily take longer.
Nintendo never said who the original developer was but rumours suggested it was a Bandai Namco studio in Singapore, made up of a number of veterans of LucasArts and the cancelled Star Wars 1313 project.
An obvious question is why Nintendo didn’t just use Retro Studios from the start, but the developer now is very different from their heyday in the GameCube era.
Senior engineer Mark Haigh-Hutchinso sadly died of cancer in 2008 and many staff have left over the years, with a number ending up at ReCore developer Armature Studio.
In recent years Retro Studios has instead focused on the Donkey Kong Country series and helped out with Mario Kart – very different games to the first person Metroid Prime.
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It is possible to view the news as a positive though, as it’s certainly reminiscent of Nintendo’s attitude towards development in the earlier generations when, for example, they famously delayed the launch of the N64 console simply because Super Mario 64 wasn’t yet completed to their satisfaction.
This compares to a generation later, with the GameCube, when key titles such as Super Mario Sunshine and Zelda: The Wind Waker appeared to have their releases rushed out the door.
A famous quote from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto insists that, ‘A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad’.
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