Metroid Database.com

Prime Blue, the man who brought us clean recordings of the Metroid Prime and Echoes soundtracks, has made yet another contribution to the Metroid community by scanning and translating for us a retro article from the official Nintendo magazine of Germany, Club Nintendo! The article, titled "Samus in the 16-Bit Dimension", provides a detailed summary of the development history behind Yoshio Sakamoto's masterpiece, including an overview of all the phases of production. The article is somewhat short, but contains a few new bits of information beyond the other fascinating Japanese article I've translated, "When Samus was Naked." Not only do we get a good sense of the game's two and a half year development history (we're told it would have taken a single skilled person 37 years to complete!), but we also get some more juicy tidbits about the recording of Super Metroid's sound effects:

[Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano] considered the screams of Samus and the aliens, which they got out of the computer, to be less ominous than desired. Then Minako Hamano had a brilliant idea. She stood in front of the microphone herself and cried, groaned, whimpered - the results will truly unsettle players of Super Metroid.

We'd previously known that Kenji Yamamoto's voice was used for Spore Spawn and that Minako Hamano had recorded the voice of Samus (an early recording was scrapped because it was too 'erotic'), but I wasn't aware she was responsible for the decision to use the microphone - and recorded most of the other SFX herself! This is a pretty amazing find, so thank you again, Prime Blue!

Until next time...
Captain Commando