In a recent interview with Gamespot, Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aime said that Nintendo turned to Team Ninja to help them bring the Metroid franchise back to a “harder edge” game more in line with traditional Metroid titles.
“Metroid, for us, is a key franchise. In our view, really since the SNES Metroid we haven’t broken through in terms of 1.5, 2 million units. That’s our bar, that’s the scale we look at on a global basis to say ‘this is effective.’Â …we wanted to place Samus back in the more traditional lineage of Metroid. We wanted to do it in a way that had a harder edge and we weanted to go deeper into her story and more into this Metroid mythology.”
Fils-Aime went on to explain how, although Nintendo could have done it on their own, bringing team Ninja on gave them an extra boost of ‘special sauce,’ as he put it, giving them a fresh take on the classic series. He also talked of how other development teams were excited to hear that Nintendo is open to collaborative partnerships on key franchises, and suggested that they have been receiving offers to make similar titles from other developers.
“A year ago someone could have asked me what’s going on with Metroid, when are we going to go back to the more traditional series ….here’s the answer in other .”
Other M is still a long way off, but it’s looking pretty good. What does he mean by “harder edge?” We’ll have to wait to find out, but it sure sounds good from here.