You can’t have a conversation about the greatest game of all time without discussing Nintendo’s 1994 Super NES classic, Super Metroid. The game’s intricate world design, alien atmosphere, and robust play mechanics cemented it as an instant classic, and its reputation and influence have only grown since then. Its development, however, sounds like it was a bit of a nightmare.
“During the final six months of development I didn’t know where I lived any more,” director Yoshio Sakamoto recalled in an interview for the July 2009 issue of Retro Gamer magazine. We republished that interview in 2021, and portions of it recently appeared in the Mini SNES Companion book packed in with Retro Gamer #287.
During Super Metroid’s development, Nintendo was still located at its previous headquarters in Higashiyama. That building “became like a boarding house for the Super Metroid team,” according to Sakamoto. “It got to the stage where I really don’t remember going home at all! There was a nap room where it was okay to sleep, but sometimes it was full [of sleeping, overworked Super Metroid staff] – those were the worst times, when I wanted to sleep but couldn’t, and I didn’t have time to go home!”
Sakamoto was apparently smiling and laughing while telling this story, but these days, when game industry crunch is rightly seen as a scourge, it’s a lot more difficult to find the humor in it. But, well, I guess the guy who led Super Metroid has earned the right to feel however he wants to feel about the game’s development.
“There were always between ten and fifteen of us in the office through the night, so we had to take naps in turns. The nap room wasn’t being cleaned or looked after at all, because we were always using it; one morning staff from another area came to wake us up and told us that the room smelled like a zoo. Another Nintendo employee put a room freshener in the nap room, but that only made the place pong even worse. Everyone in Nintendo gave us funny looks,” Sakamoto said with a laugh. “It’s quite sad having only these kinds of memories!”
For my fellow Americans – “pong” is apparently slang for a bad smell, as I’ve recently learned from my British colleagues. While Sakamoto seems to wear the bad smells and ridiculous hours as something of a badge of pride, Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi wasn’t so happy with the way the team was approaching the game.
“Yokoi-san, who at the time was my section chief and who always had fresh ideas, was always angry when he saw us all completely absorbed and working crazy overtime on Super Metroid,” Sakamoto explained. “He came in and said, ‘Are you lot trying to produce a work of art or something?’ [Laughs] But this was an epic and we were already way past our deadline, and it seemed we were getting progressively further from our objectives – Yokoi-san was becoming angrier with us day by day during that period.”
But in the end, Yokoi was as enamored with Super Metroid as the rest of the gaming world. “When other developers brought their action games to Nintendo,” Sakamoto recalled, “he’d always compare them with Super Metroid and invariably ended up recommending the third-party developer to ‘go away and play Super Metroid.’ That’s how fond he was of our game. I suppose this is a better memory than the smelly nap room anecdote.”
Super Metroid ranks high on our list of the best SNES games of all time.