When I say "first time" I mean in 1986 when I was in 4th grade. I'm not playing it today for the first time.
The 80's were a pretty special time as far as home gaming was concerned. The NES really redefined what we all thought of gaming because prior to its release, the comparison between arcade and home versions of games were pretty extreme. One only need look at the rather extreme difference between Pac-Man in the arcade and the piece of crap that we got for the Atari 2600 to understand what I am talking about.
With the NES we started focusing mostly on games that didn't even exist in arcades and that was a good path to go down as a gamer back then. You never ended up disappointed because you had nothing to compare it to. This was especially true in epic adventures such as Zelda, Castlevania, and of course the topic of today's blog, Metroid.
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Keeping in mind that we had no internet in 1986 nor did 99% of the world have any concept of what such a thing might be. Therefore, when this game came out we didn't really have any idea what it could possibly be and other than magazine articles, there wasn't really any good way of Nintendo letting us know. I suppose there were some commercials but I don't recall ever seeing them. So basically it worked like this: One of your friends with rich parents would end up getting it first, you would run over there to check it out and then you would start scheming as to how it is that you were going to come up with the $30 or so that it would cost for you to get one of your own. This game was so long that nobody was really willing to loan it out to a friend, so you needed to have your own.
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Even to this day I can see this screen and know that this is the starting area and that you had only a "pea shooter" at that point that would extend only a bit away from your suit. Just to the left of where you start out was the upgrade that allowed you to morph into a small ball to get to areas that were in small pathways.
The game just kept giving you upgrades that were necessary to travel from one area to the next and well, aside from some really basic upgrades in a game called Adventure on the 2600, I don't recall this being something that I had ever experienced in a game before.
you see, prior to Metroid and Castlevania, side-scrolling games like this were normally arcade style and upgrades were available the entire way through the game and when you died, you lost them. Think of Contra if you will. The idea that you needed to accumulate upgrades over a long period of time through an entire story was something that we had never really thought of before yet it would end up becoming what is still my favorite style of game to this day.
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You would constantly be encountering rooms such as this one where you are wondering how the hell you are meant to kill the thing that is crawling around on the bottom only to later get the bomb upgrade that made clearing out certain floor pieces possible. When you did get certain upgrades you already knew that there was potentially a lot of backtracking to hidden rooms that were not accessible previous to you getting these upgrades. This made going back to old areas so much more fun even though the respawning of enemies was a bit on the annoying side.
Never before had we played games that encouraged so much exploration and the game never became repetitive because when you re-entered a room with a new weapon it was like playing a completely new game. I recall in particular how much easier early monsters were once you got your hands on the "wave beam."
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This weapon went through most walls and had a much larger striking area than any other weapon that you have received up to this point. Areas that seemed really tough before were now a breeze.
Getting new items that were common such as missile capacity upgrades or even better, energy tanks were a lot of fun as well because all of a sudden your ability to deal damage as well as take it was increased dramatically.
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Even though it was near 40 years ago I still recall this one particular energy tank that you encounter through a door and you are like "hooray!" and run towards it only to fall through a false floor below it. You do end up coming through the door on the other side later but that was just one of the many surprises in this game that just kept on coming.
Bosses were plentiful, and there were more than a single way of defeating them. Who can forget the final battle with mother brain and how the amount of projectiles that were flying across the screen made the game slow down to a crawl because the NES wasn't actually powerful enough to have so many things moving at once.
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Mother Brain wasn't actually a very difficult boss but it was just immensely frustrating because if you stepped in almost any direction you would get bumped away from where you could hit it through the broken glass and often this pushed you into the lava that ate away at your health. Hits from projectiles would force you in a certain direction and falling towards the front of that platform would often invoke a controller-throwing-rage-fit that would scare your actual mother.
When you get to the very end of the game and are offered the chance to play the game again with more powerups I think almost everyone did exactly that. Imagine making a game so fantastic that when the players complete it they actually want to play the entire game from start to finish all over again? Amazing, right?
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One crazy thing that kind of boggled my elementary-school brain was that there was no way to save your game on the cartridge. Instead we got these passwords or pass word, that would change depending on exactly the sort of items that you had and how much of the game you had progressed through. If you have access to an emulator or even better, an actual Metroid game on a functioning NES this website breaks down how the passwords worked and has a load of options for starting the game in various fun modes.
Metroid is in my memory as one of the most amazing gaming experiences of my life and I am quite happy that I was alive and just the right age to enjoy it properly. I am sure that my parents thought it was a waste of time but I don't think anyone could have foreseen how huge the gaming industry was going to become. I believe it is the most profitable entertainment industry on the planet now and I was there when it all began!