Have past and present Retro Studios employees disclosed a lot about the development of the MP games? While I am fond of them, I haven't dived super deep into what happened behind the curtains. My biggest gripe with the interview is Kiwi not inquiring him about cut material. Last time I checked fans were dying to know more about the earliest MP1 builds, they're so different and rough looking.
TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Intro 00:52 - Miyamoto Referring To Zoid As Zoid-O-San 01:53 - Game Problems Miyamoto Pointed Out On Space Pirate Frigate/Scale 03:45 - Bluerooms To Scripting To Artwork 05:19 - Morphball Cameras/Camera System 08:42 - Doors/Loading Rooms and Triggers 10:54 - Retro Studios Licensed An Open Source Compression Software To Gain More Memory 13:29 - Spindle Camera In Prime 2/Dark World Transitions 14:57 - Elevators/Physics Transition Of Samus 17:16 - Horizontal Doors Were Removed In Prime 2 Due To The Screw Attack 18:06 - Screw Attack Camera 19:06 - Metroid Prime Has One Of The Most Complicated Third Person Cameras Ever 19:44 - Most Bosses In Prime 2 Were Done By The Designers Themselves/Scripting System 21:35 - Cinematic Camera System Having 1 Frame Glitches 22:45 - E3 Response To Metroid Prime 24:06 - Tutorial Section Of Prime 1 25:13 - Parasite Queen/Strafing 26:06 - Translating Design Ideas To Work/Damage Hue 29:05 - Spider Ball Guardian Scripting System 29:41 - Elder Chozo Room In Chozo Ruins Took A Month To Script 33:30 - Infinite Ball Jumping Wasn’t Considered Because Of Rooms Without Ceilings 34:50 - Master Layers/Why Zoid Put In Locks To Prevent Sequence Breaking 36:09 - Speedrunners/Sequence Breakers 36:58 - Enemies Respawing 37:58 - Metroid Prime Would Still Have To Be Made The Same Way Today/Memory Allocation 40:40 - Manscaped Sponsored Segment/Memory Allocation Part 2 42:39 - Falling Off Cliffs In Prime 2 44:10 - Being A Professional Street Fighter II Player In The 90s 45:04 - Super Metroid/Zoid Put Super Metroid Into Metroid Prime But Nintendo Declined It 46:50 - Metroid Game Code Was In Japanese 48:00 - Working With Tanabe On The Incinerator Drone & Phazon Mines 49:10 - Network Programming For Multiplayer For Portal 2/Dota 2 50:44 - Zoid Speedrunning Metroid Prime Before Going Gold 51:37 - Zoid Worked 100 Hour Weeks For Months On Prime 1 52:10 - Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze’s Camera System/Zoid Misses RUDE Camera System 54:17 - Zoid Suspects Retro Have Rewritten The Renderer For The RUDE Engine 54:56 - Zoid’s Early Days 57:13 - Why Zoid Retired/The Best Part Of Game Development 59:33 - How Zoid Dealt With Adjusting To Not Working 1:01:27 - Where To Follow Zoid 1:01:59- Zoid Hates NFTs 1:04:06 - Retro Studios Caliber Of Talent Will Never Be Replicated
Great interview, this dude is awesome. Like Matthews, he was really good at breaking down the complicated technical stuff into easy to understand concepts. It seems to be a common theme that your guests praise the team at Retro as the best one the've ever been a part of. Their passion, intelligence, creativity, and hard work come across in every single one of their games.
Holy crap, Zoid has Boards of Canada - Trans Canada Highway on his wall. BoC, along with Kenji Yamamoto, have both been hugely influential to me and my music. In fact, my Metroid Prime inspired track "Agon Stroll" starts off with a chord progression that was inspired BoC's "1969", off of their album "Geogaddi"; that's really awesome to see we have similar tastes in music.
The way everyone just gushes about Mark's work makes me love Retro even more. They're just so supportive and awesome! They made me go buy his book, and it's super interesting! Definitely a dense read, but after watching this I know it's worth it!
I never, EVER thought I would get to see the developers of the trilogy talk about it's development! I absolutely love this interview and god, the nostalgia is hitting hard, haha
What a fantastic and insightful interview. Really appreciate your knowledge of the Metroid Prime games to ask the right questions explore in depth the development of these games
So cool to hear about the underpinnings of Prime. I had no idea the Hall of Elders was so mechanically dense (or one of the first things they built!) Thank-you both!
Wow, cool seeing interviews that dive into the technical side. I don't know if you are planning on interviewing any more Prime devs, but on the off chance you are I'd be curious to hear their thoughts on the Metroid Prime 2 suit reflection glitch that ended up becoming a happy accident and adding the "grime," to Samus's suit in the game.
Hey Mr Zoid, Metroid Prime 1 and 2 are two immensely incredible games. To everyone that was part of the creation of those games, I salute you. I remember those moments when I first played these games on the Gamecube years ago and it was truly the first time I felt like a badass playing a character, even more than when I played LoZ, Perfect Dark, and Goldeneye.
This is utterly compelling content. I've never played a better game than Metroid Prime and I might not ever play something better. Thanks for the insight, Zoid.
Most of the locks were added to prevent the "soft locks" that were left in by mistake (e.g. not collecting the Artifact of Warrior when it appeared, then moving two rooms+ away, causing the game to change the "Master Layer", meaning that the Artifact was removed forever - preventing you from finishing the game). A couple of these "soft locks" found their way into MP2 as well... However, the lock added to the Plasma Beam door in the 0-02 Players Choice release (for example) was only added to prevent sequence breaking - and no other reason. You couldn't crash that room if you tried (unless you were navigating in the "out-of-bounds/Secret Worlds" and didn't "dump" the previous room(s) correctly). Seven unique versions of MP1 exists, all with their own subtle - or significant - tweaks and changes. And the remastered version is *no* exception (see: Space Jump First).
I'll never forget the first time I beat Prime 1 as an adult I remember reading the credits and seeing some of the messages from the people who worked on the game. A lot of them were basically apologizing to their families for not being around the the past many months because they were in crunch time so bad
i never thought I would learn so much about the prime series. with this new perspective. makes me love it even more in some ways. and ancering question s that I wondered. glade how most of the developers view prime 2 more then the first. definitely knoticed the refinement in that game.
way late to the party but appreciate that i stumbled across your channel and these dev interviews. gave this a listen on my morning jog and it was the perfect discussion to follow-up my recent playthrough of Prime Remastered. gonna jump into some of your other content, thanks again!
lol, although I can appreciate your optimism, Mark Pacini's reason for declining has nothing to do with views. He is just over talking about Metroid which is fair enough. An interview with Mark is NEVER going to happen
Been binge watching the Retro studios videos. Always been curious about primes trilogy development. I was hoping the next person to interview I was wondering if you can ask them about the Metroid Prime 3 Prototype that was running GameCube. Like how they were doing the control scheme on a GameCube controller and the first area of Norion. But if you can’t ask the question then I understand ever since it could be under NDA maybe
Well I hope we get a HD port of the Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Switch T some point, or atleast HD Remasters of Metroid Prime 1 and 2 Echoes for the Switch, since as that former Retro Studios Employee said several months ago, Prime 3 would be very hard to port on the Switch.
The timing of you doing these interviews couldn't have been better, considering there's a VERY high chance Retro is releasing a remake of Metroid Prime this year.
I'd love to hear devs explain why a charged phazzon shot works like a master key. Except like 2 ice beam doors. Also breaks and kills things that you can't otherwise. That'd be neet.
Am I right in believing that more memory allows you to have a higher polygon count in your enviroment and characters? I wished you would have asked that.
Yes it does, effectively because of that open source compression they had so much more memory which is why the artists were able to make the art so much better than everything else on the Gamecube, that along with some other trickery. Memory takes a toll on pretty much everything e.g engine, textures, lighting etc.
@@KIWITALKZ Nice. I'm asking because he said they had arround 20mb of RAM on the GameCube for Prime 1 and 2 and the Switch has 3.2Gb and I'm just trying to imagine the possibilities they have with Prime 4 with 160 times as much RAM. Yeah I know HD games use more memory, but still, its a colossal jump and the Switch isn't even that powerful for todays standards.
@nasis Well as Zoid pointed out in the interview, yes you may have more RAM but you also have much more detailed polygons/textures, more sophisticated lighting and other components that takes up heaps of memory so you therefore still end up with a prettier version of the same hurdles. Prime 4 will probably look stunning but I wouldnt be surprised if they still run into the same problems with loading doors, loading and unloading of rooms, not to mention the memory thats eaten up by the complexity of the camera system, Samus' morphball and Samus herself.
@@KIWITALKZ True, but if you compare Prime 2 with Prime 3, Prime 3's enviroments are much larger and still more complex, because the Wii has 4 times more memory than the GameCube. So Prime 4 should definitely have bigger enviroments and less doors while pushing the level complexity even more. I even expect that rumored Prime 1 Remake to rework the level layout and remove all the blue doors which you can just go through anyway and merge all the rooms into one single enviroment and just keep the beam specific doors to control the player progression and keep the elevators between the worlds. Imagine getting into Phendrans Drifts and its all one consistent area from the elevator all the way till the boost ball and back with opened up passage ways where the blue doors used to be on the GameCube.
@@nasis. well if you listen to the Jack Mathews interview you will see they still ran into massive hurdles with Prime 3. Skytown for example they had to incorporate a lot of trickery to get it to work. I mean you could be right and im sure yes, they will have bigger and more detailed environments in Prime 4 for sure but, these people thinking Prime 4 will be open world are being unrealistic, time will tell.
I stay in contact with him from time to time, he enjoyed it and thinks a good job was done on the remaster, he was disappointed in the changes to the doors and the OG team being omitted from the credits.
38:44 Metroid Prime was definitely not 320x240.That would have looked really bad. It was 480i. I suppose he was thinking of the number of scanlines to render each field (1/60 sec), which was just 240.
There must be some little backstory or perhaps just a sheer force of will behind someone so integral to the creation of and a font of expert knowledge of probably Samus's most celebrated outings, yet insisting on mispronouncing her name 😂 Notwithstanding, excellent listen.
Get 20% OFF @manscaped + Free Shipping with promo code KIWITALKZ at MANSCAPED.com!
Zoidosan ought to livestream a full playthrough of Prime, commentating as he goes. Would be very entertaining I think.
Have past and present Retro Studios employees disclosed a lot about the development of the MP games? While I am fond of them, I haven't dived super deep into what happened behind the curtains. My biggest gripe with the interview is Kiwi not inquiring him about cut material. Last time I checked fans were dying to know more about the earliest MP1 builds, they're so different and rough looking.
He provided live commentary for the AGDQ 2014 speedrun of Prime 1 (watch?v=R_yaHHofJIo). That's as close as you can get I guess.
@@DDevilized Yeah I saw that live. I'd like to see him play it alone. I am fully aware it likely won't happen.
Nice marathon Logo
@@colinm5548 Hats off to 819
Left 4 Dead, World Of Warcraft, Dota 2, Portal, Quake and Metroid Prime is one HELL of a resume lol holy shit this guy is a legend
Thank you so much for being part of the creation of the best Metroid ever made!
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Intro
00:52 - Miyamoto Referring To Zoid As Zoid-O-San
01:53 - Game Problems Miyamoto Pointed Out On Space Pirate Frigate/Scale
03:45 - Bluerooms To Scripting To Artwork
05:19 - Morphball Cameras/Camera System
08:42 - Doors/Loading Rooms and Triggers
10:54 - Retro Studios Licensed An Open Source Compression Software To Gain More Memory
13:29 - Spindle Camera In Prime 2/Dark World Transitions
14:57 - Elevators/Physics Transition Of Samus
17:16 - Horizontal Doors Were Removed In Prime 2 Due To The Screw Attack
18:06 - Screw Attack Camera
19:06 - Metroid Prime Has One Of The Most Complicated Third Person Cameras Ever
19:44 - Most Bosses In Prime 2 Were Done By The Designers Themselves/Scripting System
21:35 - Cinematic Camera System Having 1 Frame Glitches
22:45 - E3 Response To Metroid Prime
24:06 - Tutorial Section Of Prime 1
25:13 - Parasite Queen/Strafing
26:06 - Translating Design Ideas To Work/Damage Hue
29:05 - Spider Ball Guardian Scripting System
29:41 - Elder Chozo Room In Chozo Ruins Took A Month To Script
33:30 - Infinite Ball Jumping Wasn’t Considered Because Of Rooms Without Ceilings
34:50 - Master Layers/Why Zoid Put In Locks To Prevent Sequence Breaking
36:09 - Speedrunners/Sequence Breakers
36:58 - Enemies Respawing
37:58 - Metroid Prime Would Still Have To Be Made The Same Way Today/Memory Allocation
40:40 - Manscaped Sponsored Segment/Memory Allocation Part 2
42:39 - Falling Off Cliffs In Prime 2
44:10 - Being A Professional Street Fighter II Player In The 90s
45:04 - Super Metroid/Zoid Put Super Metroid Into Metroid Prime But Nintendo Declined It
46:50 - Metroid Game Code Was In Japanese
48:00 - Working With Tanabe On The Incinerator Drone & Phazon Mines
49:10 - Network Programming For Multiplayer For Portal 2/Dota 2
50:44 - Zoid Speedrunning Metroid Prime Before Going Gold
51:37 - Zoid Worked 100 Hour Weeks For Months On Prime 1
52:10 - Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze’s Camera System/Zoid Misses RUDE Camera System
54:17 - Zoid Suspects Retro Have Rewritten The Renderer For The RUDE Engine
54:56 - Zoid’s Early Days
57:13 - Why Zoid Retired/The Best Part Of Game Development
59:33 - How Zoid Dealt With Adjusting To Not Working
1:01:27 - Where To Follow Zoid
1:01:59- Zoid Hates NFTs
1:04:06 - Retro Studios Caliber Of Talent Will Never Be Replicated
Great interview, this dude is awesome. Like Matthews, he was really good at breaking down the complicated technical stuff into easy to understand concepts. It seems to be a common theme that your guests praise the team at Retro as the best one the've ever been a part of. Their passion, intelligence, creativity, and hard work come across in every single one of their games.
Holy crap, Zoid has Boards of Canada - Trans Canada Highway on his wall. BoC, along with Kenji Yamamoto, have both been hugely influential to me and my music. In fact, my Metroid Prime inspired track "Agon Stroll" starts off with a chord progression that was inspired BoC's "1969", off of their album "Geogaddi"; that's really awesome to see we have similar tastes in music.
The way everyone just gushes about Mark's work makes me love Retro even more. They're just so supportive and awesome! They made me go buy his book, and it's super interesting! Definitely a dense read, but after watching this I know it's worth it!
I never, EVER thought I would get to see the developers of the trilogy talk about it's development! I absolutely love this interview and god, the nostalgia is hitting hard, haha
What a fantastic and insightful interview. Really appreciate your knowledge of the Metroid Prime games to ask the right questions explore in depth the development of these games
Zoid's the Real Deal! Great score on the interview.
Why is it that every time I hear something about Zoid he gets cooler?
So cool to hear about the underpinnings of Prime. I had no idea the Hall of Elders was so mechanically dense (or one of the first things they built!) Thank-you both!
This is incredibly interesting. I knew the cameras were complicated in the Prime series, but I didn't know how they worked.
Wow, cool seeing interviews that dive into the technical side.
I don't know if you are planning on interviewing any more Prime devs, but on the off chance you are I'd be curious to hear their thoughts on the Metroid Prime 2 suit reflection glitch that ended up becoming a happy accident and adding the "grime," to Samus's suit in the game.
Of course the interview starts with Zoid talking about the Incinerator Drone lol
Lovely interview so far!
@LetsPlayNintendoITA her name is Claris
@LetsPlayNintendoITA that's not how it works
Please don't deadname
What's the big deal with the incerator drone?
@@ZachHixsonTutorials It's an RNG nightmare
Hey Mr Zoid, Metroid Prime 1 and 2 are two immensely incredible games. To everyone that was part of the creation of those games, I salute you. I remember those moments when I first played these games on the Gamecube years ago and it was truly the first time I felt like a badass playing a character, even more than when I played LoZ, Perfect Dark, and Goldeneye.
Great interview KIWI 👍 The Metroid prime crew are Champions 🏆
This is utterly compelling content. I've never played a better game than Metroid Prime and I might not ever play something better. Thanks for the insight, Zoid.
I can't believe I didn't know this channel existed. Really loved the interview, and I can't wait to watch all the other interviews you've done.
Most of the locks were added to prevent the "soft locks" that were left in by mistake (e.g. not collecting the Artifact of Warrior when it appeared, then moving two rooms+ away, causing the game to change the "Master Layer", meaning that the Artifact was removed forever - preventing you from finishing the game). A couple of these "soft locks" found their way into MP2 as well...
However, the lock added to the Plasma Beam door in the 0-02 Players Choice release (for example) was only added to prevent sequence breaking - and no other reason. You couldn't crash that room if you tried (unless you were navigating in the "out-of-bounds/Secret Worlds" and didn't "dump" the previous room(s) correctly).
Seven unique versions of MP1 exists, all with their own subtle - or significant - tweaks and changes. And the remastered version is *no* exception (see: Space Jump First).
This is amazing to see as a Metroid fan! Respect to all of you involved!
I'll never forget the first time I beat Prime 1 as an adult I remember reading the credits and seeing some of the messages from the people who worked on the game. A lot of them were basically apologizing to their families for not being around the the past many months because they were in crunch time so bad
The morphball camera transition is such an iconic visual cue. It’s so good for showing you how much of a bad-ass samus is.
Thank you for your work. Prime 1 is my favourite game of all time.
Awesome interview, I enjoyed it a lot. A lot of respect for Zoid. Hope to see more of his work in the future, after a well deserved vacation.
Thanks so much to both of you for doing this excellent video
i never thought I would learn so much about the prime series. with this new perspective. makes me love it even more in some ways. and ancering question s that I wondered. glade how most of the developers view prime 2 more then the first. definitely knoticed the refinement in that game.
Grew up playing his CTF mod on Quake 2 👏
way late to the party but appreciate that i stumbled across your channel and these dev interviews. gave this a listen on my morning jog and it was the perfect discussion to follow-up my recent playthrough of Prime Remastered. gonna jump into some of your other content, thanks again!
Damn, this video is already at 5000 views. Maybe Mark Pacini will change his mind and do a interview after all 😅
lol, although I can appreciate your optimism, Mark Pacini's reason for declining has nothing to do with views. He is just over talking about Metroid which is fair enough.
An interview with Mark is NEVER going to happen
didn't he say he hated Metroid?
I didn't know he worked on so many of my favorite games. Thank you!
Been binge watching the Retro studios videos. Always been curious about primes trilogy development. I was hoping the next person to interview I was wondering if you can ask them about the Metroid Prime 3 Prototype that was running GameCube. Like how they were doing the control scheme on a GameCube controller and the first area of Norion.
But if you can’t ask the question then I understand ever since it could be under NDA maybe
thank you for this amazing interview ... very insightful
Oh wow, the channel is growing so fast. Great video.
Amazing interview!
Whats up with the cut at 24:28, bathroom break 😅?
It's a secret👀
Well I hope we get a HD port of the Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Switch T some point, or atleast HD Remasters of Metroid Prime 1 and 2 Echoes for the Switch, since as that former Retro Studios Employee said several months ago, Prime 3 would be very hard to port on the Switch.
I can’t believe that he didn’t mention Infinity Complex! 😱
The timing of you doing these interviews couldn't have been better, considering there's a VERY high chance Retro is releasing a remake of Metroid Prime this year.
I'd love to hear devs explain why a charged phazzon shot works like a master key. Except like 2 ice beam doors. Also breaks and kills things that you can't otherwise. That'd be neet.
Am I right in believing that more memory allows you to have a higher polygon count in your enviroment and characters? I wished you would have asked that.
Yes it does, effectively because of that open source compression they had so much more memory which is why the artists were able to make the art so much better than everything else on the Gamecube, that along with some other trickery. Memory takes a toll on pretty much everything e.g engine, textures, lighting etc.
@@KIWITALKZ
Nice. I'm asking because he said they had arround 20mb of RAM on the GameCube for Prime 1 and 2 and the Switch has 3.2Gb and I'm just trying to imagine the possibilities they have with Prime 4 with 160 times as much RAM. Yeah I know HD games use more memory, but still, its a colossal jump and the Switch isn't even that powerful for todays standards.
@nasis Well as Zoid pointed out in the interview, yes you may have more RAM but you also have much more detailed polygons/textures, more sophisticated lighting and other components that takes up heaps of memory so you therefore still end up with a prettier version of the same hurdles. Prime 4 will probably look stunning but I wouldnt be surprised if they still run into the same problems with loading doors, loading and unloading of rooms, not to mention the memory thats eaten up by the complexity of the camera system, Samus' morphball and Samus herself.
@@KIWITALKZ
True, but if you compare Prime 2 with Prime 3, Prime 3's enviroments are much larger and still more complex, because the Wii has 4 times more memory than the GameCube. So Prime 4 should definitely have bigger enviroments and less doors while pushing the level complexity even more.
I even expect that rumored Prime 1 Remake to rework the level layout and remove all the blue doors which you can just go through anyway and merge all the rooms into one single enviroment and just keep the beam specific doors to control the player progression and keep the elevators between the worlds. Imagine getting into Phendrans Drifts and its all one consistent area from the elevator all the way till the boost ball and back with opened up passage ways where the blue doors used to be on the GameCube.
@@nasis. well if you listen to the Jack Mathews interview you will see they still ran into massive hurdles with Prime 3. Skytown for example they had to incorporate a lot of trickery to get it to work. I mean you could be right and im sure yes, they will have bigger and more detailed environments in Prime 4 for sure but, these people thinking Prime 4 will be open world are being unrealistic, time will tell.
Would be interesting to hear what he thinks of Remastered (Metroid Prime Remastered) as well as any of the OG devs of the original.
I stay in contact with him from time to time, he enjoyed it and thinks a good job was done on the remaster, he was disappointed in the changes to the doors and the OG team being omitted from the credits.
This is awesome!
38:44 Metroid Prime was definitely not 320x240.That would have looked really bad. It was 480i. I suppose he was thinking of the number of scanlines to render each field (1/60 sec), which was just 240.
Speaking of Breaking Bad, if you squint it almost looks like Jesse finally made it to New Zealand, and even picked up an accent!
he's a fan of boards of Canada 😎
Jak and Daxter Rift Apart should have become a meme. 😂
*Zoidphun, if I remember correctly.
There must be some little backstory or perhaps just a sheer force of will behind someone so integral to the creation of and a font of expert knowledge of probably Samus's most celebrated outings, yet insisting on mispronouncing her name 😂
Notwithstanding, excellent listen.
You make such beautiful videos!!! Don't miss out - Promo'SM!!