Fans Have Created Their Own Metroid 64, And It Looks Incredible

The Metroid series famously skipped the Nintendo 64 back in the ’90s. The “lost game” Metroid 64 was never in development, with Super Metroid director Yoshio Sakamoto saying that he “couldn’t imagine” how Samus would move around a 3D environment with the N64 controller. We only ever got to see and play as Samus in the very first Super Smash Bros. on the console, and that just feels wrong!

Despite offering the opportunity to an outside studio, it couldn’t come up with an idea for the 64-bit console. Alas, we had to wait until 2002, when we would get two Metroid games within a day of each other — Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion.

Fans have long speculated just what a Nintendo 64 iteration of Metroid might’ve been like, but two fans have taken that one step further and actually created what they would’ve liked to have seen with Samus back in the day.

Twitter user Luto Akino has shared footage of his vision for Metroid 64, which was created using Unity 3D. Using a third-person perspective, you can see Samus running around a purple-ish cave area, shooting at small blocks with her arm cannon.

Rather than going for the Prime route and taking on the FPS genre, this version of Metroid 64 looks more like a 3D action platformer, with Samus jumping up a series of small platforms. When she’s at the top of the cave, she also rolls into her morph ball form! This is probably what most people thought Metroid in 3D would be like before Prime existed, and, honestly, it looks fantastic.

Luto says that there’s a bug with the arm cannon, where the beams don’t shoot in the right direction when Samus is against a wall, and there are no enemies visible yet, but these early insights look promising.

Luto has clearly been working on this for a while now, and the developer has been sharing updates across their social media. Some early footage from last December shows Samus’ movements much more closely.

Luto is working with a friend to bring this vision to life and plans to release it to the public. That’s probably still a ways off yet, but if this is just a snippet of what’s to come, we can’t wait to see more.

Let us know what you think of this fan mock-up of Metroid 64 down below!