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Nintendo's Crackrock Revealed
Press the Buttons has linkage to and commentary on an N-Sider story explaining some of the wacky decisions that Nintendo has made over the years. From the post: "There are a lot of unanswered questions out there in Nintendoland: Why was there never a Metroid 64? Why did cliche villain Wario become a major character, and then only for the Game Boy? What was the Virtual Boy supposed to accomplish? Why was there only a Game Boy follow-up to Kid Icarus? The short answer is 'politics'."
It's a rather sad story, Gunpei Yoko died in a car crasha ayear after being disgraced into leaving nintendo.
One thing the article missed though is about Metroid, specifically how Retro got into it and produced Metroid Prime (possibly one of the best games ever made)?
There are probably articles you can Google about this if you want to read up. The long and the short of the whole Metroid thing is that this game does not sell in Japan. At all. That's why there was no Metroid 64, that's why Nintendo outsourced Metroid Prime. It is just not a franchise they really believe in personally, and besides, being that it's always appealed more to western tastes than Japanese, who better to develop the GameCube update than a western developer?
They got Retro because they were cheap, and had done some decent work that Nintendo liked in the past (not enough to get them noticed by many people, though, so they stayed cheap). But still, there were apparently major problems with the development of Metroid Prime that forced Shigeru Miyamoto to get personally involved in the project - while most of the grunt work was done by Retro, it was Miyamoto that whipped the game into shape. It was supposedly in such a sad state about a year before release that Nintendo considered killing it altogether. Miyamoto just thought Retro was too inexperienced - talented, but inexperienced - and that all they needed was some guidance. He was right.
The game still didn't sell in Japan, though. It is completely a western phenomenon, which makes it completely different from everything else Nintendo does. They are still firmly rooted in Japan, and the rest of the world is secondary.
I wish I could give you some sources for all this, but it's nothing I didn't read online as the whole thing was going on so you should still be able to find articles at places like GameSpot and IGN.
Why did cliche villain Wario become a major character, and then only for the Game Boy?
It may not have been the greatest game made, but Wario was the star of Wario World for the GCN.
e2 | LJ
Metroid IS backtracking. It's always been in the series.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."