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The critically acclaimed Metroid Prime is swiftly approaching its 20th anniversary, having launched on the GameCube back on November 18th, 2002.
To celebrate, ex-Retro Studios dev Zoid Kirsch will be sharing daily anecdotes on the development of the game leading up to the anniversary on the 18th. He’s already knocked out about five stories so far, and one in particular caught our eye for its sheer ingenuity.
According to Kirsch, the in-game static effect that would occur when moving close to the Scatter Bombu or Pulse Bombu enemies was actually achieved by rendering the Metroid Prime software code itself. Due to the limited RAM available on the GameCube, the dev team struggled to create noise texture that wouldn’t take up so much space, so an engineer came up with a rather brilliant idea, as detailed below:
It’s quite insane to think that the static we’re viewing during these segments is actually the Metroid Prime software code being rendered! We’re consistently blown away by some of the workarounds that developers had to come up for older games and it really puts into perspective just how darn clever and creative these folks are.
We’ll be keeping an eye on Kirsch’s Twitter feed in the coming days for more juicy development stories. In the meantime, be sure to check out an older story regarding the lengthy approach in creating the Metroid Prime logo.
What do you make of this story? Have you been playing Metroid Prime recently ahead of its anniversary? Morph Ball down to the comments and let us know!