Despite having decades of audiovisual advancements and cinematic inspiration to draw from, few games have crafted a narrative as immediately gripping as Super Metroid’s opening moments.
It begins with a cryptic, teasing title crawl: 1994. Obscured imagery of…something. Bodies? A strange chirping sound can be heard. Nintendo. Some sort of machinery. The enigmatic music begins to pick up tempo. Presents. Another body… Metroid 3. The camera focuses on the source of the chirping—a tiny Metroid enclosed in a glass case—then pulls back, revealing the entire scene as the large amber gradient logo appears at the top: Super Metroid.
The familiar Metroid title theme begins, but it’s slightly different than you remember. Everything is different; it’s darker and foreboding. The opening titles are colored a blood red, subtly indicating players should expect a very different experience than the typically lighter fare from the House of N. It’s somewhat easy to overlook given the nature of video games, but there are literally corpses on the title screen of this game. This Nintendo game. Human corpses in a first-party Nintendo product, let alone within the first few seconds, is a rarity even to this day.
At this point your 23-year-younger self hasn’t even touched the controller yet, but younger (or possibly nonexistent) you knows you’re in for a ride. What follows is essentially the Swordfish of video game opening acts, complete with a boss battle and a self-destruct sequence, all within the span of some modern games’ initial loading times. Just the music that plays over Samus’ retelling of the previous two games is chill-inducing. You can hear it in your head right now, can’t you?
Writer/director Yoshio Sakamoto likens Super Metroid’s presentation to a silent film. After the prologue, which caught players up on the events of the first two games and tied the trilogy together, the developers took a minimalist approach to the story. The music and sound design evoke emotion and atmosphere, while the game’s environments build a growing sense of isolation.
While the storytelling was modeled after the dialogue-free films of the early 1900s, Super Metroid strived to push the limits of cinematic video games in every other way. The high-quality audio and visuals were so detailed and extensive that the game required a 24 Mbit cartridge—the largest Super NES game yet. The developers were deliberately trying to make a movie, but for a home console.