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Metroid Prime's scan visor was Nintendo's idea, says former Retro dev

by rawmeatcowboy
04 September 2016
GN Version 5.0

Coming from a Game Informer interview with former Retro dev, Mark Pacini...

“Originally when we were talking about what Samus would be able to do in the game world, we had visors in the game, but we didn’t really expand too much on them. You have your thermal visor, and you have your X-ray visor, and stuff like that. … It seemed like such a silly idea, Nintendo’s thing was like, ‘this is going to be about the scan visor. This game is about scanning the environment’, and we’re like, ‘Okay, but this is like an action game, this is like a shooting game’. But as the brilliance of them, and it was Tanabe-san who had an idea of like, ‘well what if we did this, and you get information, this is how we do the tutorials, and this is how you give the players instruction, and we could do all these things with the scan visor’. And because their motivation was, ‘this is a game about the scan visor’, and our’s was not at all, but we did the due diligence to integrate it in a way that felt natural to the game and how would we want to do this? So that’s how it went back and forth, and that was like a really great suggestion on their part because it seems so simple now, but at the time, there weren’t a lot of games like this.”

[Link]