Well, as we've already pointed out in a couple of articles already, the next big NES 25th anniversary approaching is Metroid's. We're now only a couple of weeks away from the day the first game in Samus Aran's famous series first went on sale in Japan, and we fully expect a new wave of interesting Metroid trivia to follow from the inevitable Iwata Asks columns that pop up dedicated to remembering the franchise next month.
But why wait for those?
There are enough interesting little tidbits already rolling around my brain and out there in the depths of the Internet to get a jump on the trivia train this time, so I'm going to get this thing started right here today. Here are six things you didn't know about Samus Aran. And if you do actually already know some of them, keep count of how many of the six you'd already heard about.
#1:+Armorless+Samus+is+All-American
OK, OK, so everyone everywhere knows about how Samus Aran was originally a dude. The developers switched her gender over to female partway through development of the first Metroid, then only revealed her womanliness in the ending credits if you completed the game fast enough. And then you could even play through the game again with her gender totally unobscured, as an armorless version of Samus wearing only a bikini that was available if you typed in a proper password.
But that never happened in Japan. Since Metroid was first released as a Famicom Disk System title in Nintendo's home country, it had save slots to record players' progress and no password system. The passwords only came into the picture with the American localization of the game in 1987, and it was only with the password feature that you could access Armorless Samus. (A.K.A. "Justin Bailey" Samus, named for the most popular password that triggers the costume swap.)
So the playable bikini mode was basically just added as a bonus for Americans. It would then go on to be included in Europe's version of the game as well, but poor Japanese players were stuck with just the normal, fully-armored Aran. They had to wait years for the introduction of the character's form-fitting Zero Suit to finally get to control her outside her armor.
#2:+The+Origin+of+Samus'+Morph+Ball
Samus Aran equips her versatile Chozo Power Suit with all kinds of crazy armaments and upgrades throughout the Metroid games, but none is more iconic than the first power-up she grabs before all the rest -- the Maru Mari, nowadays known as the Morph Ball. It's an ability that lets our hero compress her body down into the size and shape of a simple sphere, which then lets her fit through small spaces as she explores her environments. It's been a part of every Metroid game, even the 3D titles have utilized it, and one entire spin-off (Metroid Prime Pinball) is wholly based on the ball-shaped form.
And it only exists because of a lack of programming skill.
Nintendo's programmers and graphic designers couldn't quite handle the task of animating Samus getting down on all fours and crawling through tight spots back when the first Metroid was in development. It was too tough for them to figure out, apparently. In fact, Samus can't even crouch in that first game either. Standing straight up and down was the only posture they could manage for her, and running, jumping and firing her weapons all worked at full height. Those crawlspaces though? Not a chance.
So they just made her turn into a ball. A perfectly acceptable solution for an 8-bit title and its relative lack of realism -- but if you think about it, it's been pretty ridiculous since then. She's a woman wearing a suit of armor normally, that makes sense. But what happens to her when she morphs? It's like having a human riding inside a Transformer and staying in there when it transforms. That's a recipe for a squished, dead human right there.
Maybe Iwata will ask about that.
#3:+Samus+&+Sigourney
Have you ever put together how similar the Metroid series is to the film Alien film franchise? Nintendo's games might not have existed if not for the influence of the movie brand, as the parallels are numerous.
The first is just the overall science-fiction setting, which no Nintendo game had ever explored before. And then there's the fact that Samus is a woman and the lead hero of the series, just as Sigourney Weaver's character, Ellen Ripley, serves in that same role for Alien. And the two characters are out to destroy a lethal alien menace that's threatening humanity.
The later Metroid games push the characters' connection even further, as Ellen ends up bonding with the xenomorph species she once sought to annihilate and Samus grows attached to the Metroids as well -- saving the baby Metroid in Metroid II's ending sequence, bonding with it as a major plot point of both Super Metroid and Metroid: Other M, and even having herself injected with Metroid DNA in Metroid Fusion to save her life. (Not unlike Ellen Ripley getting cloned with xenomorph biology.)
The most direct homage is in the name of Samus' arch-enemy, though -- the endlessly reborn space dragon Ridley was named after Alien's director, Ridley Scott.
We'll see the connection between the Alien and Metroid franchises grow even closer later this year, when Aliens: Infestation launches for the Nintendo DS. It's a side-scrolling adventure from WayForward that is pretty clearly drawing on Nintendo's Metroid designs for inspiration -- in a really good way.
#4:+Samus+&+The+Angry+Birds
The lore of the Metroid series tells us that the reason Samus Aran is such a bad-ass bounty hunter is because she was raised by birds. The ancient, dying sentient bird people called the Chozo took her in and raised her as one of their own after she was the lone survivor of a Space Pirate attack that killed her parents. As they raised her, they trained her, prepared her to fight and ultimately bestowed her signature Power Suit upon her. The Chozo made her ready to become a hero, destined to destroy the Metroids.
And they probably did it out of guilt, since the Metroids were all their fault.
Digging a bit deeper in the series' backstory reveals that the Chozo were not only responsible for creating the franchise's bounty hunter hero, but also her prey -- the Metroids were originally engineered bio-organisms developed by the same bird people. They were meant to clear the planet SR-388 of a separate infectious species, the X parasites, and they did their job a bit too well. They succeeded in nearly wiping out the X and then mutated and turned against their masters themselves.
It gets worse. The final boss of the first Metroid and the driving force behind the Space Pirates is the enormous bio-computer Mother Brain, and it too was a Chozo creation. They developed it in happier days and, like the Metroids, it turned evil.
So when you really boil it all down, the entire Metroid series is basically the result of a bunch of old bird people making crazy decisions.
#5:+An+Aran+Family+Reunion
For being a technically extinct race of people, the Chozo show up an awful lot throughout Samus' adventures. She explores their ruins, statues of them offer her power-ups, she battles a few of them to prove herself. They're pretty visible.
The other part of Samus' upbringing, though, is not explored nearly as much. Who were Samus' parents? Where did our hero really come from -- the human part of her, that is, not the cyborg suit.
Well, would you believe her dad's name was Rodney?
Chief Rodney Aran and his wife Virginia were the biological parents of our favorite hunter, and they're the ones who died in the Space Pirate attack on human colony K-2L. Their story was explored in a 2002 Japanese manga book based on Samus' early life. Both Rodney and Virginia are portrayed as heroically sacrificial, fighting back against the invasion and successfully preserving Samus' life in the chaos.
Of course, that's if you believe the manga is canon. The storyline of the games somewhat contradicts its depiction of those events, and other sources of backstory from Nintendo even give Samus' parents different names -- Chief Avram Aran is her dad and Captain Thea Aran is her mom in Nintendo Power's interactive online story Blood of the Chozo.
Even more off-the-wall? Samus has a little brother out there somewhere. His name is Solomon Aran, and Blood of the Chozo said he was "missing and presumed dead" after that same K-2L colony attack. "Presumed dead" always means "still alive" in games and movies, so he's just been lying low for years on end.
If you believe that.
#6:+Samus'+Mental+Fortitude
The last little conversation-starter I'll leave you with today has to do with some interesting information that developer Yoshio Sakamoto offered in a 2004 interview near the release of Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance. According to him, Samus' Power Suit isn't easy for her to wear -- it puts her under constant mental strain to maintain its existence. Here's his quote:
"For Samus to remain connected with the Power Suit requires mental energy unfathomable to an ordinary person. In situations like this when she is under pressure, indeed, even Samus is unable to concentrate her mental energy. However, when Samus completes the trial of the spirit of the mural (God of War), she regains her strong force of will and can successfully integrate with the Legendary Power Suit."
This one was new to me in pulling together things for this article, but it helps to make sense of some other moments in the series, like the more recent Metroid: Other M. There, some cutscenes show Samus' suit wavering in integrity, like it's phasing in and out of existence and she can't hold on to it. I thought it was just a weird Team Ninja storytelling thing at the time, or perhaps they did it just to be able to show off Samus' female physique more frequently throughout the tale.
But apparently there was canonical support for it all along, and those moments were just the result of the emotional distress she was undergoing at the time, causing her to lose her mental grip on the suit temporarily.
Mr. Sakamoto answered another question on the same topic in the same interview which is available in its entirety over at The Metroid Database. This time the question was about why Samus' suit is shut off near the end of Zero Mission, leading into that game's Zero Suit sequence:
"For Samus's suit to appear, considerable powers of concentration are necessary. In short, it was too constraining. It's the same as a salary man loosening his necktie when returning from a business trip on the bullet train."
Who would have thought to equate cyborg body armor with formal neckwear?
That's all for today, Samus fans. Did you learn anything new, or was all of this old hat to you? Either way it's likely that the Metroid trivia is just getting started, as the floodgates of factoids are sure to open up when the game's actual anniversary date arrives on August 4. Stay tuned for that!
