We are rapidly approaching the 20th anniversary of the GameCube classic Metroid Prime on the 18th November (the same date as the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and the anniversary of the Wii U - Nintendo really knows how to plan its dates) and the development team has some stories to tell.
If you have been brave enough to grace Twitter with your presence over the past few days, you might have seen ex-Retro Studios developer Zoid Kirsch (@zoidctf) sharing a number of anecdotes about his time on the game detailing anything from how the game's static came to be, to why there are elevators between worlds. Now, Kirsch has encouraged some of his other team members to get involved and this one from Jack Matthews (@jack_mathews) might just take the biscuit as the weirdest story we have read so far.
Apparently, the original game had a 'bad batch' on release, where some copies would see objects doing all kinds of crazy things that they shouldn't be doing. Nintendo only had one dev kit with this CPU, and the team needed to use it to work out how to fix the problem (slowing the code down enough, but not too much). On top of this, the kit needed to be really cold in order for the team to see what they were doing.
We'll let Matthews take it from here.
Yep, that's right. In order to fix a bug on what many believe to be one of the greatest games ever made, the development team had to literally put their dev kit in the freezer to see the problem! Ah, the joys of game development.
Of course, this chilly solution did enable the team to fix the problem and all players who had the issue would get a new disk sent out to them - patching old school-style - but it is a pretty cool story all the same. The rest of Matthews' thread goes into detail on the nitty gritty of why the glitch was there in the first place and we definitely recommend reading it through to see just how far game creation has come in the last 20 years.
Now, time to defrost the GameCube and get playing before the anniversary.
What are your memories of Metroid Prime? Aim for the comments and give your thoughts a shot!
[source twitter.com]
Comments 31
Metroid Prime, a game best served cold.
I'll see myself out.
the Ice Beam is always effective at dealing with tricky little bugs
You learn something everyday. That saying still stands strong today.
"wow, making games must be such a magical experience"
Ok, you get started on making those circuits in the acid bathtub. Me and the other members are going in the freezer to test code.
That's ice to know.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZbbUv1hz6mE
Anyone else think these pre-20th Anniversary tweets are leading up to something...?
Are we being primed?
The moment I walked into Phendrana Drifts, I literally froze with chills!!! It brought me back to that feeling of isolation and loneliness that the original Metroid game struck me so hard with when I was a kid.
@gcunit I sure hope so. MP 4 or MP trilogy, my body is ready
There's no better way to eliminate bugs than freezing them.
👆👆👆 Do people have to have kids to learn these terrible puns 😂
@JimNorman That was the same day Metroid Fusion was released for the GBA.
Nintendo didn't rerelease Fusion because was right: The people will not know what happened, and there would be tribunals. In that game, Samus downloaded WEAPONS!
That was also three days off the Japanese release of Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. (the 21st)
@gcunit
That'd be awesome but I doubt it. I've been hoping for the Trilogy or Prime 4 news for so long that I've lost faith
I think it's Metroid Prime 4 that's been put on ice.
It's pretty crazy to think that, behind the scenes, gaming is pretty much duct tape, cardboard, and apparently freezers.
Also, this reminds me of that puzzle in Resident Evil where you had to take that stuff into a freeze room for a couple minutes.
Stay frosty!
Really hoping we see some more cube games show up on the switch, the lack of the original Pikmin games, Metroid primes and even melee make me hopeful that GC shows up as a part of NSO+ or maybe NSO+++
@gcunit I hope. Is the story of the freezer meant to signal something coming up in Winter?!? heheh
That's a great story, but this article missummarizes it a bit, for people who care about that sort of thing.
By my reading, it was a 'bad batch' of Gamecubes that was to blame here, not Metroid Prime discs. The CPU's in the bad batch would basically freak out when the game ran too fast (specifically, a specific pipeline that MP used in a unique way would catastrophically overflow when the game shoved too many graphics into it too quickly), and since there was no function for the game to be able to dynamically detect if the CPU was from a good or bad batch and tackle the problem head-on, the only fix was to painstakingly insert slowdowns into the game code by hand to make sure that the game just never quite overflowed the pipe.
As for why the only way they could reliably reproduce and test the problem was by putting the system on ice, that's anybody's guess. Speaking as someone who's worked in validation testing, sometimes there's just an element of black magic in electronics that you've gotta roll with - if a certain system only misbehaves while turning it upside-down and chanting ancient Aramaic, then by golly, you better break out your inverted English-to-Aramaic dictionary. Serious hats off to the intrepid testers who identified and tested out this bug; even figuring out that abnormal ambient temp was the make-or-break factor, much less exhaustively testing it under those conditions, must've been one hell of a bug report to tease out.
I wonder how long those bad copies were available and how common that bug was. Metroid Prime was the reason I got the Gamecube, but I got the game about a month after it came out. I remember it being sold out in some places. I remember the game sometimes freezing during elevator rides. It was common enough that it happened to me quite a few times, but only once or twice per full game, and usually early on.
edit: As my comment posted, Fath's right above it also appeared which provided more context.
Man, I remember being blown away by the graphics in prime. What a great game. I still have 1 and 2, I never really got into 2 though back then. I'd love to play them again, but I'm strictly a switch gamer these days. Can't beat bringing the game with you to the toilet or to bed.
@Fath I was about to post that, as a professional software engineer and programmer, the freezer part makes no f***ing sense to me.
I didn't think something like that would work
‘Cool’ story. Would love to learn more about these bugged out initial Gamecube consoles.
First time reading that initial consoles were borked and devs had to rewrite their code to circumvent this.
@zgillet
Wouldn’t the cooler temps simply eliminate any thermal constraint and allow the CPU to run faster? Only thing that slows down under extreme cold temperatures to my limited knowledge would be storage. Not sure how memory (RAM) behaves under / zero temps.
Guess that's where they got the inspiration for Tropical Freeze.
I adore Prime. I really wish they'd put all of them on the Switch. They don't need to change much.
And then in a different batch, the game ran too slow, so they had to take it back past Vulcan Raven to the furnace room and THEN test it out. Worst part of that game.
And i thought Metroids died from freezing, who have thought it saved them.
What? Which CPU? I don't understand the article.
@Mortenb
Quick summary:
That is the best way I can summarize it.
My question: How come we’ve never heard of this before?
Full nerdy details:
The issue was that the write gather pipe on these broken CPU's wouldn't stall when it was full or properly report its status, so we had to keep inserting NOPs in the code to slow it down just enough to stop stalls from happening, but not so much to slow down the game. 7/7
@Hwatt I don't know... Maybe it simulated some faulty component somehow on the defective units? I don't know how temperature affects capacitors.
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