An interesting document has been discovered online from Tony C. Giovanni’s personal website, who was a level designer at Retro Studios back in 2002. On his site was a document containing information regarding a scrapped Metroid Prime game, which was to be set immediately after Metroid Prime and before the events of Metroid Prime 2.

Quoting from the document:

This adventure would take place immediately after Samus takes off from the surface of Talon IV. Upon exiting the planets surface, Samus decides to take a long rest in her Cryo chamber as her ship autopilots home. However, something goes wrong and Samus’s ship computer hones in on a distress signal. The distress signal is coming from a huge alien vessel (huge like the size of several Star Destroyers) that is drifting out in space. As Samus’s ship approaches the alien craft, a tractor beam activates and the Ship is pulled into one of the gigantic docking bays. As the ships doors close, the gigantic vessel folds and enters a parallel dimension, thus begins Samus’s new adventure…

The document goes into details regarding the plot, which is focused on a mad AI on board a warship heading for a peaceful planet in order to enslave the inhabitants and life there. The AI has four different personalities, “The Child”, “Mother”, “Martyr” and “Killer”.

The lengthy document outlines things such as world layout, example areas of the ship, puzzle elements and details new creatures, which includes a lifeform that is half Metroid/human!

The document also lists various power-ups that Samus can obtain. These are:

• Cloaking
• Self Destruct Method
• Wall walk
• Ceiling hug
• Camo-skin
• Infrared vision

The game also planned to include various multiplayer modes such as an Ancient Chozo Robot battle, in which you could enter and beat up other robots until one remains standing.

The whole concept of Metroid Prime 1.5 took a year to put together and the document and all images have since been removed from Tony Giovanni’s website. I would naturally assume that the idea, like many games was simply scrapped in favour of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes which was released a couple of years later. It is normal for many ideas and concepts to be scrapped, but very rarely do we hear about them.

Credit to Mama Robotnik who found the original document and Nintex for providing us with it.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Metroid News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.