Metroid Prime is a kid in a candy store in the middle of Disney Land on its birthday on Christmas Day — and it’s sitting in the corner with a plate of broccoli and a ball of yarn. It could’ve gone big. It could’ve aspired to be an analog to Microsoft’s green guy: an imitator, a counterpart, a rival that rode 2001’s newfound appreciation for shooting things in the face using some buttons on the end of a wire.

In a world where it was that rival — a dark, dark, world — Retro’s efforts could’ve been Nintendo’s analogue to Killzone or Halo.

It could’ve tried to have it all. But it didn’t.

And it’s for that very reason Prime has aged so well. It didn’t try to merge onto the popularity super highway — it built its own lane on that small purple cube and stayed in it. It’s a vision so aptly executed technically, mechanically, and artistically that it’s easy understand why some call it the Citizen Kane of video games.

Looking around, you wouldn’t exactly think that’s true — we’re not exactly drowning in Prime-likes. It’s not become a Souls-like sub-genre where countless imitators and creators have attempted to move that style forward. Prime hasn’t been outwitted by would-be successors because there aren’t really any. Inspired by, perhaps. Carriers of the vibe, maybe. But no successor as brazen as those who nip at FromSoftware’s armour-plated heels.

Some of that might come down to what Metroid Prime didn’t do. The suit, the visor, the arm cannon — they weren’t things to have fun with, they were means to solving the puzzle that was the world of Talon IV. The value of a suit upgrade wasn’t necessarily in its ability to act as a dopamine dispenser, but in how it would empower you to push your way through an alien world that wanted anything but. Virtually every mechanic is a means to an end, and not the end itself. That space pirate needs to die so you can get to the next room to find the thing that lets you get the next thing. Unlike contemporaries like Halo where killing was the point, mowing down that space pirate wasn’t a thrill in the traditional sense. Progress was its own reward in Prime, and developer Retro merely gave you the means to make that progress. That progress was the dopamine hit. 

It sounds like Retro’s efforts are being damned with faint praise here. Yet it’s really more to say that Retro exercised restraint. It’s a design philosophy, I think, that asks whether something makes sense in the world, and how in-the-suit it makes us feel. That hulking arm cannon feels and looks like a tool first, reluctant weapon second. It feels like it doesn’t want to be fired. Instead, exploration was our strongest weapon against beasts and baddies. Those classic Metroid collectables — health upgrades and missile expansions — were our best means of survival, and they were only obtained by immersing yourself in the world and its many, many secrets.

Prime’s moment-to-moment fundamentals aren’t all that special, then. They’re just fine, and that’s just fine. It’s tempting to call these mechanics simple and distilled, but refined and focused are more apt. They allow Retro’s sixty-frame world and its atmosphere to be palpable and ever present. We’re not spending minutes in menus fiddling with numbers and notches. We’re in the visor, we’re in the suit, and we’re in the world on that portable purple box.

Prime isn’t quite a shooter, making it tough to knock it for being a middling one. It’s not the visceral, muzzle-flash fest of its contemporaries: no shaking screen, no traditional reload animations, no squaddies to back you up. It’s not a dopamine-dispensing frag fest like its contemporarie. Prime elegantly evades competing with shooters that do those things — which is basically all of them — by refusing to play their literal game. Samus’s arm cannon spends more time shooting doors in Prime more than shooting bad guys.

It’s not quite a platformer, either. That makes it tough to knock it for being a middling one. Missed platforms abound — Prime literally isn’t a walk in the park in the jumping department. A brilliant game that’s not a particularly great platformer.

Then there’s what Prime doesn’t do. It could’ve had fiddly, stat-based suit management that demanded you distribute power between defence and firepower. Prime could’ve had arbitrary collectables — dog tags, specimens, alien doo-dah thingies. Prime could’ve had traditional dual-stick controls and regenerating health.

Metroid Prime deflects criticism because it’s not all that clear which criteria we should use to do so — partly because of all the things it doesn’t do. The less you do, the less there is to do badly. Prime doesn’t lean so heavily in to any given of many personalities to ever adopt one of those personalities badly. You can’t really be judged for being a bad Elvis tribute act if you’re not donning the wig and the trademark suit. You’re not shooting enough to hate its shooting, nor the platforming, nor the story. It doesn’t hinge its identity on any one personality. Except, perhaps, for its world. 

And what a world. It’s a veritable fruit basket of classic video game biomes: fire, ice, forest, sand, and bits in between. It feels alive and lived in yet dead and dilapidated. A place ruled not by baddies with guns, but by wildlife in desperate need of an attitude adjustment. The world of Talon IV is full of life just doing its thing, and it just so happens that part of said thing involves trying to kill you dead.

Still, it’s also easy to see why someone might not like Prime. It’s not a particularly great shooter, nor a great platformer, nor an Oscar-winning narrative. If that foreground stuff is your focus — a perfectly fine take to have — then Prime might miss the mark for you. But if you’re a bit more far sighted, like I am, and background ambience and vibe is your thing, then it might be very well live up the claims of it being the near-perfect game on that criteria alone.

2004’s Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is lends further credence to this perspective. It’s a very literal dark-world twin — a game itself about a dark world with an anti-Samus — that tries to do things that Prime didn’t. Split screen multiplayer, NPCs, dialogue — selection of what ifs. A slice of an alternate timeline where Prime embraced the video-game shooter trends of its time. Echoes tried new things, exposing it to entirely new avenues of failure and criticism of that failure. Perhaps a product of fashion and the drive to develop a sequel to best-seller rather than a product of passion, Echoes was fittingly named: it was an echo of its progenitor in this writer’s opinion.

Prime works — and still works — because it simply did its own thing: it went full Nintendo before Nintendo went full Nintendo. Prime competes with everyone else by not competing at all. By carving its own path in a gaming galaxy, it created its own standard by which to be judged, a bar so high that even its sequels couldn’t reach. Prime aged so well, not because it chased trends, because it bucked them — because it explored a new way to play with an old hero who was willing to take on the universe in multiple dimensions for the very first time.

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