Last year’s E3 was packed with quite a few hype-worthy announcements from Nintendo. However, an update on the highly-anticipated Metroid Prime 4 was not one of them. Even though the game was announced during E3 2017, Nintendo has been silent about the game until now, and for good reason.
General Manager of the Entertainment Planning & Development Division of Nintendo, Shinya Takahashi, recently posted a fairly spartan and solemn video about Metroid Prime 4’s development. Usually, when a company posts a development update video, it provides a bit more fanfare, but not this one.
Even though Takahashi expressed that he understands how much gamers anticipate the game and thanked them for their words of praise and encouragement, he eventually broke the bad news: Metroid Prime 4 didn’t live up to Nintendo’s standards. More importantly, it didn’t live up to the standards set by the Metroid Prime franchise.
According to Takahashi, the game’s development status was “very challenged,” which forced him and the rest of his team to make a very difficult decision: Nintendo would scrap everything currently made for the game and start over from scratch.
It’s not all bad news, though. Producer Kensuke Tanabe will stop working with the undisclosed original Metroid Prime 4 development team and instead collaborate with the studio behind the Metroid Prime trilogy. That’s right, Retro Studios is back in the driver’s seat. Since Kensuke Tanabe worked with Retro Studios on Metroid Prime 2 and 3, as well as the Donkey Kong Country Returns franchise, odds are good Metroid Prime 4 will eventually live up to, if not exceed expectations.
We at Twinfinite await any more news on Metroid Prime 4 and will relay all development updates on the game. Until then, remember the wise words of Shigeru Miyamoto, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
