Retro Studios dev discusses scrapped version of Varia Suit in Metroid Prime

A portion of a ShineSparkers interview with Mike Sneath, senior artist on Metroid Prime….

SS: In the early stages of development you put together one of the first versions of the Varia Suit which was eventually redesigned and modelled by Gene Kohler. Tell us about your version of the Varia suit and why it was eventually scrapped to be completely redesigned.

MS: When I first modelled the Varia suit it was under a very tight deadline and as I finished each part of the suit another artist Rodney Brunet would paint the texture plus another artist Ludovic Texier created the gun arm of Samus. The deadline was so tight because model had to be complete so it could be rigged an animated. At the time the goal was to make sure we could create this cool movie for E3 when Nintendo would announce that we were creating Metroid. So at that time we simply had to take the old Samus Varia suit and just recreate it so we could get the E3 movie done.

We had used that version of Samus for about a year and then I think after about a year into the project was when Nintendo had asked Retro to explore a new updated design for Samus. When the new Varia suit redesign ideas were being considered Gene Kohler (the other character artist on Metroid) was already doing a great job on Samus gun arm and Gene already had reputation not only as great character artist but he really kicked ass when it came to making metal armor look really cool with all the work he did on Retro’s RPG title before it got canned.