That Metroid the series skipped the well-known Nintendo 64 back in the 90s. The “lost game” Metroid 64 was never in development, and Super Metroid director Yoshio Sakamoto said he “could not imagine” how Samus would move around in a 3D environment with the N64 controller. We only got to see and play as Samus in the very first Super Smash Bros. on the console and it just feels wrong!
Despite offering the option of an external studio, it could not come up with an idea for the 64-bit console. Alas, we had to wait until 2002, when we would get two Metroid games within a day in a row – Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion.
Fans have long wondered what a Nintendo 64 iteration of Metroid could have been, but two fans have taken it a step further and actually created what they would have liked to have seen with Samus back then.
Twitter user Luto Akino has shared footage of its vision for Metroid 64, which was created using Unity 3D. Using a third-person perspective, you can see Samus running around in a purple-like cave area and shooting at small blocks with his arm cannon.
Instead of going the Prime route and taking the FPS genre, this version of Metroid 64 looks more like a 3D action platformer, with Samus jumping up a series of small platforms. When she’s at the top of the cave, she also rolls into her morph ball shape! This is probably what most people thought Metroid in 3D would be before Prime existed, and honestly, it looks great.
Luto says there is a fault with the arm cannon, where the beams do not shoot in the right direction when Samus is against a wall, and there are no enemies visible yet, but these early insights look promising.
Luto has obviously been working on this for a while now and the developer has been sharing updates across their social media. Some early footage from December last year shows Samus’ movements much closer.
Luto is working with a friend to bring this vision to life and plans to release it to the public. It’s probably still a long way off, but if this is just a snippet of what’s coming, we can not wait to see more.
Tell us what you think about this fan-mock-up of Metroid 64 below!