Or heck, Wii Sports? Because while it’s a good series, it’s never really been an ‘A Tier’ Nintendo series, and it’s not the kind of the series which has generally ever sold consoles to much of a degree. Why not discuss say, Star Fox, or F-Zero, or Wario Land/Ware, or Donkey Kong Country or heck, Pikmin considering how many of those sold as well as the original Metroid ever did. Let me look at this through sales numbers:
1. The highest selling Metroid game sold about 2.8 million copies.
2. But two of the Star Fox games sold over that, and many more than a million. Is that not a series with as much being messed up with it as possible by Nintendo? You had the action adventure/Aonuma Zelda clone Star Fox Adventures and on foot sections in later games, which weren’t well received, and that could easily be something to cover.
3. Or F-Zero, which has sold about 2 million at it’s peak. That’s only a bit more obscure than Metroid.
4. What about the Donkey Kong Country series, selling at least 2 million copies a game (Returns sold about 5 million, same as the second game, and shocking, the collectathon Mario 64 type game sold about 6 million copies, more than most of the other games in the series). Why no articles about that? Donkey Kong 64 is pretty much the worst case scenario for you, it’s a 3D platformer which sold more than many 2D ones.
5. Heck, what about Wario? His two series sold about Metroid levels at one time, if not more. Wario Land 1, 3 and 4, as well as WarioWare Smooth Moves, Touched and a few others sold more than any Metroid game did. More ironically, Wario Land 4 used the exact same engine as Metroid Fusion, yet sold about half a million more copies. I’ll give some credit, the Super Hard mode had more danger than any recent Nintendo game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faDHX60xNQs
But maybe I’m missing something, because I’m not from the US. Maybe Metroid’s a lot more popular over there than the UK (it’s certainly more popular there than in Japan) and it’s more of a cultural thing.
And while I dislike Metroid Other M, I can appreciate what they were trying and failed to do, it was fairly obviously aimed at the Japanese market and people who read some obscure manga series. It didn’t do well but I don’t think even really cares what happens to the Metroid series as much as people think. Probably just a random experiment like they do with many 2nd tier Nintendo series (aka, all the ones listed in this e-mail)
This is because you are only looking at sales numbers. Sales numbers do not compare equally due to changing contexts over the decades. Sales from 1980 do not directly compare to sales in 2000.
For example, by your logic we shouldn’t talk about PONG or consider it influential because HALO outsold PONG. Call of Duty 4 outsold home versions of Pac-Man so, by your standard, Call of Duty 4 is more influential. To go that direction would only lead to wrong conclusions.
It’s so important to understand the context of the times. How many people owned a computer in the early 1980s? Not too many. Comparing a computer game’s sales then to a computer game’s sales today is not fair and not useful. Many kids who grew up on gaming still play games as older adults. And they have significantly more money at their disposal at the age of 40 than they did at the age of 5.
Another major change is that there were no global market prior to the 1990s. The NES was delayed in Europe because NOA was tied up in the American courts at the time.
And in the later 1980s, one thing that you must also consider was the great Cartridge Shortage of 1988. Many games did not get reprints, even if they sold out, because there were not enough cartridges to spare. Not even the new games got enough cartridges they wanted. Unlike discs today, sales were limited by it.
Nintendo reprinted several NES games near the end of the NES lifespan:
Perhaps someone will remember the others. I know the Legend of Zelda was one of them. So that leaves two others that I am not sure.
But Metroid was definitely a hit. The game wouldn’t have been reprinted otherwise. Making cartridges was very expensive.
Metroid captures the imagination almost as much as Mario or Zelda did. Much of Metroid’s universe somehow appeared in cartoon shows at the time including Mother Brain being the evil villain in Captain N.
I am not sure what you are asking. Are you asking why people still like to talk about Metroid and still remain fans of the game?
Nintendo’s ‘accessible and friendly’ games strategy wasn’t new with the Wii. It was done with the NES. Games like Super Mario Brothers and even Legend of Zelda were designed to be accessible and friendly.
Metroid wasn’t.
In fact, Metroid’s popularity is precisely because it wasn’t accessible and friendly or cute and cuddly.
Metroid’s appeal is due to it being Nintendo’s ‘badge of honor’ game. To explain what the ‘badge of honor’ is, let me reference the arcade game called Defender.
Defender is an extremely difficult game. Look at its controls…
It looks like it is two sets of controls, but it is only one. You had like four or five buttons. In order to reverse, you had to hit a reverse button. It is not like the controls you have when you play the game on a console.
If only noob friendly games sell, then Defender should have died in the arcades. It didn’t. It was a phenomenal hit. Why? How can a game become so popular that is not friendly to new players? How can a game that rips players to shreds and have insane controls be so popular?
The answer is the badge of honor. Experienced arcade gamers focused on Defender, the hardest game, to show off their skills among their friends as to who is the ‘real’ gamer. The word ‘hardcore’ is thrown around too casually these days (see what I did there? Hee hee), but if anything was ‘hardcore’ it would be a game like Defender.
The NES also had its share of ‘Badge of Honor’ games. The reason why you keep hearing gamers say something like “He could beat Ghosts and Goblins on the NES!” was because it was a very difficult game. There are too many difficult games on the NES to list, but in this time period it was common to feel an achievement beating a game and to brag to your friends about it.
Beating Super Mario Brothers was no badge of honor. Anyone could do that. Ditto with Zelda (though the Second Quest and maybe Zelda II might qualify as ‘badge of honor’ games).
You would take your ass made of bread dough to Metroid and, soon, it would be carved out of wood. Metroid was the ‘real man’s game.
Metroid seemed as if designed to be devious. The game was a maze with long vertical corridors. It was unforgiving as you would be thrown into a pit of lava and would die very fast. Enemies would keep knocking you off. And if you got knocked off at a tall shaft, you had a long way to fall. The game had walls you could walk through. It had power-ups on the ceiling and hid power-ups in the starting area that most players wouldn’t think to look. It had fake bosses. The game was punishing and cruel. Oh, so cruel. And even if you managed to beat the final boss, you had a limited time to get out or die. No game was this evil.
But the game wasn’t unfair or cheap, as many people seem to think of ‘retro games’ (such as Mega Man 9’s enemies placed in such a way so Mega Man keeps falling down a hole). Battletoads’ turbo bike stage was not fun or well designed. Ghosts and Goblins had some broken mechanics that made the game harder than it should be. But in Metroid, none of it seemed broken or unfair because the player was in complete control (the game wasn’t moving the player as in the turbobike stage in Battletoads or a shmup). Also, obtaining permanent power-ups (which was novel since most power-ups in games were temporary) evened it all out.
Space video games do not sell (excepting arcade classics like Defender and Space Invaders). Why? It is because women do not want to be a space ship or robot. And difficult games tend to not sell too well unless they are ‘badge of honor’ games.
Metroid was a very challenging, arcade-trippy (which no games do today unfortunately), game that was consistently fun. Prior to Metroid, all challenging ‘badge of honor’ games tended to just get faster and faster and faster until you died (such as Defender). In Metroid, you explored. Metroid had tremendous value in that you were totally in control and the game world felt endless. We were convinced there was a secret world in Metroid just as we were in Super Mario Brothers. Most NES games did not have this type of vast world in it.
And remember, the game came out in 1986. While Super Mario Brothers had ‘levels’ and Zelda had its overworld and dungeons, Metroid just had that one vast and endless level.
Above: Start four minutes in to avoid the endless looping the guy does.
You can tell the game’s design is insane. Only an experienced player can navigate through that. Also note the player in the video above is cheating with an emulator’s save state. Imagine if you didn’t have it. Just as falling down a hole kept you coming back in Mario, dying kept you coming back in Metroid.
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