Why it took Nintendo 15 years to make Metroid Dread

Around 15 years ago, Yoshio Sakamoto had an idea for the next mainline Metroid game. Called Dread, the game would feature longtime protagonist Samus Aran constantly pursued by some kind of all-powerful force. The idea was to instill fear in players with an enemy they couldn’t defeat. This was the same time that the Nintendo DS was becoming a breakout hit, but Sakamoto soon realized that the handheld wasn’t powerful enough for his ideas. “It was difficult to realize that concept with that hardware,” he said recently during a meeting with reporters.

Development on Dread stopped and started a few times due to these technical limitations, before eventually being shelved indefinitely. “We had put it on hold,” Sakamoto explains. Which is what...

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