Nintendo doesn’t know what a bounty hunter is
Ever wonder why half of Nintendo’s characters are “bounty hunters,” despite the fact that none of them, excepting the Star Fox team, ever do any bounty hunting? Well, it turns out that it’s because Nintendo doesn’t know what a bounty hunter actually is. Have a look at this excerpt from an article about Retro Studios (the creators of the Metroid Prime games) IGN published in August 2009:
Samus really isn’t about the money, a truth that confused the developer — and me, upon hearing this story — when it presented Nintendo a gameplay design that appealed to Aran’s chosen occupation. “We were looking for something more along the lines of a mission-based game where Samus collected bounties. And for the life of us we couldn’t understand why [Nintendo was] being so resistive to that concept. And then over the period of days we came to understand that their definition of a bounty hunter is not a bounty hunter. It is not someone who brings in bad guys for money. That concept was completely outside of their definition,” says Walker. Nintendo told Retro that Samus does not actually take bounties for those she hunts. (Someone should tell Nintendo that Aran has officially been labeled a bounty hunter for two decades now, a slight inconsistency.) “So we started joking that Samus was actually a pro-bono hunter. And occasionally we’ll run into those nuances of translation and culture that can sometimes derail us for days.”
Wow, it’s no wonder my dream Metroid game in which Samus does exactly as described, going on shorter bounty missions, has never been made. This kind of brings down the cool factor of Samus for me. What the hell does she do between games? How does she make any kind of living?
Recent Comments