Metroid
Introduction
Metroid was developed by Nintendo R&D1 under producer Gunpei Yokoi, first released for the Famicom Disk System in Japan in August 1986 before arriving on cartridge for the NES in North America the following year. The team set out to blend Super Mario Bros’s side-scrolling action with The Legend of Zelda’s open, non-linear exploration, and character designer Hiroji Kiyotake gave the resulting bounty hunter protagonist, Samus Aran, a fully enclosed powered suit inspired partly by the reveal-driven tension of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Players guide Samus through the caverns of planet Zebes, backtracking through an interconnected map to find upgrades like the Morph Ball and Ice Beam that open up previously inaccessible areas, in a structure that would later be recognized as foundational to what’s now called the ‘Metroidvania’ genre. The game’s most famous twist was reserved for players who finished quickly: removing Samus’s helmet at the ending reveals her as a woman, a rare and deliberately underplayed choice for a lead action-game protagonist at the time.
