Rumor: Metroid Prime dev Retro Studios was once working on a music RPG

At one point in time, Retro Studios apparently had a project in development as a music RPG.

The company shipped Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze on Wii U in 2014. After that, there was essentially a decade-long gap without a new game from Retro Studios. Tropical Freeze was ported to Nintendo Switch a few years ago and Metroid Prime Remastered dropped in 2023, but outside of that, nothing made it to market.

YouTuber Reece “Kiwi Talkz” Reilly, who has been in touch with tons employees who worked at Retro Studios and has published various interviews on his YouTube channel, now says that the developer was working on a music RPG between Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Metroid Prime Remastered. Not much is known, but the main mechanic was singing. Nintendo apparently pulled the plug since “it was a huge disaster” and there were “years of it going nowhere”.

Following that game’s cancellation, the original plan for Retro was to remaster the entire Metroid Prime trilogy, which would help the company “develop the production pipeline to be able to outsource for assistance in the future”. However, after the original version of Metroid Prime 4 was scrapped, Retro took over that title as we now know. But because of that, only the remaster for Metroid Prime 1 was finished with all other resources moving to Prime 4. It’s now unclear if we’ll see Metroid Prime 2 and 3 Remastered.

Technically, some of this information isn’t new. ResetEra WalkurtTXRanger posted similar information a few years ago, but it was only picked up by a couple of outlets. We did not report on it at the time as the rumor came from someone without a clear track record. Even the latest from Reilly isn’t confirmed as Nintendo has not shared anything officially – hence why we’re still marking this all as a rumor.

Retro Studios has seen a number of projects cancelled – particularly in its early days. The company also came up with a number of interesting pitches that did not move forward, including the Zelda spin-off Heroes of Hyrule, Metroid Tactics, and Star Fox Armada.