Retro talks Metroid, not doing two projects at once
Retro president Michael Kelbaugh and the rest of the studio “love Metroid.” And while the company could look to create another entry in the classic series someday, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze became the company’s focus for Wii U.
Speaking with IGN, Kelbaugh elaborated a bit more as to why Retro went with Donkey Kong for its first Wii U project:
“Well, we love Metroid. We love Metroid Prime and we always will. It was a big part of our studio, the culture of the studio. The majority of that team is still at Retro. When we finished with DK, we still had a lot of really cool ideas. That, in combination with what the Wii U could do, we really wanted to continue with that. Again, Retro Studios loves Metroid. We might do another one someday. But we really enjoyed working with DK as well.”
Donkey Kong Country is Retro’s only project at the moment. Those who had been hoping that the team could be working on a couple of projects at once will be disappointed.
“We’re pretty much on one major project at a time. We do a game every two years or three years. In the first year of that, we have some extra bandwidth, so sometimes… We helped out with Mario Kart 7. We helped Monster Games do the 3DS version. Sometimes we’ll have a little bit of extra bandwidth to help out other entities at Nintendo. We really feel strongly about helping out Nintendo as a whole, so if we have time, we’ll do that. Do we have the bandwidth to do two major projects at once? I don’t think so. A big project and a little project at the same time, we can do that.”
As far as the future of Metroid is concerned, Nintendo executive producer Kensuke Tanabe said:
“Basically I’m thinking of, not just Samus, but how we can expand the whole Samus universe. You remember Metroid Prime Hunters. I’m thinking about things like how we could make that go out further, with all these different bounty hunters as well.”
