In Super Metroid, No One Can Hear You Scream
Super Metroid recently celebrated its 30-year anniversary. Below, we look back at how it used and helped to create horror game tropes.
It begins with a benign pulse over black. An otherworldly synth shriek interrupting. Random shots of dead scientists in a pitch black laboratory. The only thing alive is an unknowable entity under a class capsule. Somehow, that isn’t the start of a new Resident Evil DLC, but the very first thing you see in a first-party Nintendo game in 1994. The game was Super Metroid.
Because there are entire generations of full grown adults who don’t understand the enormity of such stark horror imagery in a Super Nintendo game, we should go back to the early 90s a minute. While it’s now pretty commonplace to see M-rated games on the Switch, back in 1994, Nintendo was still trying to hold onto its innocence. Their Sega rivals had been bathing in digital blood for years, but Nintendo was trying to remain the place where everyone could play safely, and without invoking the ire of, say, Congress. As such, they were still regularly censoring arcade ports, and hesitant to put anything out that could court too much controversy, frighten children, or spill too much of the red stuff–though Mortal Kombat II was a major exception.