Sakamoto’s Metroid: Other M on-rails comments clarified

At the Game Developer’s Conference last week, Metroid: Other M producer Yoshio Sakamoto gave a lecture and discussed the development of titles such as Tomodachi Collection and WarioWare: D.I.Y. But the topic that received the most attention was Sakamoto’s remark about Other M being on-rails at one point. His comment quickly caused a stir among Metroid fans, even though many of them hadn’t realized that Sakamoto was simply interpreted.

IGN’s Craig Harris had a chance to catch up with the cocreator of Metroid after his lecture and asked him about the idea of Other M being on-rails. Harris, roughly quoting Sakamoto, explained on the latest Nintendo Voice Chat podcast that “you can move back and forth within this area, but the camera would just follow along in the 3D world.” In other words, the game would have played similarly to Klonoa.

“…I asked him about the idea of being on-rails and how long into development did it change, and he was like, ‘Oh, I think people misinterpreted what I meant by on-rails. I meant that you can move back and forth within this area, but the camera would just follow along in the 3D world.’ And then I said, ‘Well, I didn’t misinterpret it. At least in my interpretation of what you were saying was a game like Klonoa, where you can move to the right or to the left and the camera would follow around dynamically, but you couldn’t hop off this rail that you were going on…’ It’s a side-scrolling game, but just done with a camera and 3D elements…It’s a fixed path. And when I brought up Klonoa, he was like, ‘Oh, yup, exactly, that’s exactly what I meant.’ And so that was pretty cool…”