Head of Metroid Prime Trilogy discusses how it was a project of only 4 people

After hearing an interesting Donkey Kong-related anecdote, we now have another Metroid Prime-related detail from Reece Reilly’s Kiwi Talkz podcast with former Retro Studios developer and senior designer Mike Wikan.

In the meeting, he shared how the Metroid Prime Trilogy Wii compilation was created: most strikingly, it seems that the team in charge was made up of just four people. They managed to create everything and implement the controls in the pack.

We leave you with Wikan’s words:

Tanabe-san (co-producer) was more focused on the practicalities. We need more things here, we have to balance it there… There was an internal case that I got frustrated with and that we solved later. In Echoes, there are two boss guardians, the Guardians of Spider Ball and Boost Ball, and they are notoriously difficult to beat in the original versions.

[…] When we did Trilogy, it was another interesting project. Four of us did the complete compilation of the trilogy. In this way, four of us sat down and separated the three games and put them back together for Trilogy with their control scheme. Just four of us, no pressure!

[…] I was the only designer on the team who had participated in all three titles. Then I knew where all the keys were and I wrote the script for most of the game, I designed the AIs and stuff, since I knew all the crap that I could never fix. Things that most people would never know were there. People doing speedruns knew they were there because they would hit every corner of every room until they found a way. So we had a chance with Trilogy to fix those things, because they had been bugging me ever since.