Zoid Kirsch
@ZoidCTF
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Member of the Metroid Prime Original NINTENDO GAMECUBE Development Staff. Retired.
Kelowna, BC
Joined February 2009
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While many studios did amazing work on the remaster, I'm let down Metroid Prime's Remaster does not include the full original game credits. I worked with so many amazing people on the game and everyone's name should be included in the remaster, not just a single card like this.
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They fucked up the doors in the re-mastered Metroid Prime! They have the wrong alpha level on the door shields. Left is original, second is re-mastered.
I tend to be a bet picky about this since I literally spent months working on the doors. This should be fixed.
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When you see Samus’s visor affected by electrical “noise” in game, you’re actually seeing the bits and bytes of the Metroid Prime software code itself being rendered on the screen. Turns out machine code is sufficiently random to work great as a static noise texture!
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Metroid Prime's 20th release date anniversary is on November 18th. As the anniversary approaches, I'm going to tweet out a little stories about its development. Here is the second story:
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In this clip as Samus approaches the Pulse Bombu, the screen fills with static to show interference with her visor. As we worked on this a big issue is the memory use of the noise texture. The Gamecube only has 24MB of RAM, so every texture has to be carefully considered.
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After Nintendo left myself and the original team out of the credits for Metroid Prime Remastered, its nice to see id Software do it right and include everyone who worked on Quake II in its re-release. This should always be how its done.
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What was your worst game development mistake? I think mine was naming the install folder for Dota 2 "dota 2 beta" that still persists to this day.
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After thirty-two years of making games, I'm retiring from the game industry and from Blizzard. Tomorrow is my last day.
I'm looking forward to retiring and being able to spend time focused on myself and family. Some highlights from my career:
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If we used a low resolution texture (64x64) to save memory the “static” would be blurry and not crisp. One engineer on the team came up with a great idea: what if we just use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself! We quickly tried it out and it looked amazing.
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When I helped engineer the matchmaking for Dota 2 at Valve (aka Game Coordinator) I chose a 32 bit value (up to 4 billion) for the match-id. I estimated at one game per second, that's 126 years.
I was wrong, Dota 2 quickly moved to more than 15 games per second. Oops.
Today, the 7000000000th (that's 7 billion!) game of Dota 2 was officially recorded.
A turbo game with a first pick Pudge who built Eblade. They lost in 28minutes. Couldn't more emblematic.
DOTA 2.
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Metroid Prime's 20th release date anniversary is on November 18th. Each day until then I'm going to tweet out a little story about its development. Here's the first one:
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Hardware comparisons between GameCube and Switch:
Switch has 170 times the memory size and is four times faster.
Switch GPU is 50 times faster (500 vs 9.4 GFLOPS)
Switch CPU is 16 times faster (also four CPUs to single)
Metroid Prime ran in only 24MB of RAM on the GameCube!
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Twenty years later I'm playing
#MetroidPrime
, the game I helped make via emulation on Linux on a Steam Deck. It plays extremely well. It's been years since I've played it so it might be time to play through it again.
Too bad I can't play it on my Switch!
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Following up--the re-master is amazingly well done. The improvements to Samus and the boss models are awesome. I just noticed this particular change that stood out from the original. It's still a wonderful re-master and should be played and enjoyed.
#MetroidPrimeRemastered
They fucked up the doors in the re-mastered Metroid Prime! They have the wrong alpha level on the door shields. Left is original, second is re-mastered.
I tend to be a bet picky about this since I literally spent months working on the doors. This should be fixed.
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While working on Dota 2 in 2012, several engineers at Valve joined the team to help. I was working on something that used a lot of Window's API calls and I was grumpy and said "ugh Windows API sucks." One of the engineers said, "You know, I wrote USER.DLL, I was 19 at the time."
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Metroid Prime Dev Stories
#3
: Red Means Dead. One of the design goals in Prime is to make sure the player immediately knows if they are doing damage or not. Objects and creatures are often only vulnerable to particular types of damage. How is that indicated? 1/4
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Metroid Prime Dev Stories
#9
: Central Dynamo’s Power Bomb Maze. When I first started programming and learning BASIC one of the first programs I wrote was a maze generation algorithm when I was 13. It could generate a maze of any size with a single solution. 1/5
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One of my favorite things when talking to other engineers at game studios these days is telling them we fit Metroid Prime in GameCube's 24MB of RAM while running a full 60fps while streaming off a spinning game disc. The team was on fire!
What the fuck
The XBox has 64mb of memory
You're telling me Halo managed to run in that tight of a space??
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On the day we went gold I took a magazine poster and got everyone’s signature to commemorate that day. The poster is still on my wall today. You may notice no one signed on top of Samus--that’s how much respect we had for the character. My signature is top center, it's my poster!
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After Half-Life came out (and I got to play it too!), Valve reached out to me to port it to Linux since I was the "Linux guy" at id. They were working on getting multiplayer out and wanted support for a Linux dedicated server.
For its 25th anniversary we added seven multiplayer maps to Half-Life, including four brand new ones: Contamination, Pool Party, Disposal, and Rocket Frenzy. The game's been updated with Steam Networking support, so jumping on a server this weekend is easier than it's ever been.
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Quote tweet with 4 projects you've worked on
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Metroid Prime Dev Stories
#8
: Why are there elevators between worlds in Metroid Prime? As a mainstay of the Metroid games there were also three primary technical reasons: world maps could only be up to a certain size, sound banks needed changed and memory fragmentation. 1/5
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The best part of the trailer for me is the morphball physics behaving exactly as they did in the original Metroid Prime. You can see it do the little bounce around the corner at 1:02 in the trailer. It's going to control just like Prime did!
Samus Aran is back! Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will be released on
#NintendoSwitch
in 2025.
#MetroidPrime4
#NintendoDirect
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With the Metroid Prime Remastered release, I’ve seen many positive posts about the game from both old and new players. Seeing people enjoy the game is what making games is about.
Tell me how much you are enjoying Metroid Prime!
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I remember when Nintendo asked how many memory card blocks Metroid Prime was expected to take up and I said, “One!” A GameCube memory card block is 8kb, that’s way more space then we needed to save the game! 5/5
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Metroid Prime Dev Stories
#13
: Strafe jumping, i.e. getting the Space Jump early. When you are locked onto a target in Metroid Prime, pressing the jump button does a sideways dash. This lets the player easily strafe around a target and dodge incoming fire. 1/4
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Metroid Prime Dev Stories
#5
: Going gold! After a long and difficult development process, Metroid Prime went gold near the middle of October 2002, about a month before release date since they had to press the discs. It’s one of the most memorable days of my life. 1/2
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It's time to go Beyond.
Can't wait to see what my old friends at Retro have been up to!
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The response to yesterday's Metroid Prime dev story was amazing. Inspired by that, I've been working on many more stories and hope to share at least two a day over the next ten days until the 20th anniversary on Nov 18th. Today's is coming shortly!
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In this 20th anniversary tweet, I discuss the tiny morphball doors that kept Samus from rolling between rooms until they were loaded.
Has anyone seen these doors in the Remastered version? Load times are so fast on memory/cart that they probably immediately open.
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Today is the 20th anniversary of Metroid Prime’s release in North America. I think very often of all the amazing people I had the opportunity to work with in making it. Here’s a time capsule of some of the memorabilia I saved from its release.
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Ideally you shouldn’t see them very often as the load system tries to get the next room loaded. But if you are quick enough, you might bump into these little doors that help you stay in the world. 4/4
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I visited Valve in early 1998 to help them integrate QuakeWorld's multiplayer into Half-Life. It was amazing to meet the team then to see what they shipped later that year. Half-Life is an incredible game made by an amazing team.
Happy Anniversary Half-Life!
Half-Life turns 25 this weekend, and we're pushing a big update to bring back some of that 1998 feeling with restored original launch day content, brand new multiplayer maps, a look behind the scenes with the original development team, and more:
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I spent so much time working on doors. In Metroid Prime, you may have noticed that doors can sometimes take a long time to open--that’s because the room behind the door is still loading! There is at most two “rooms” loaded at once--the one you’re in and the one you’re going to.
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Fascinating. We built the first Metroid Prime in a little over 3 years. That also included building a new game engine.
Game development production times are getting longer and longer due to demands of higher fidelity and amount of content. Also team size management is a factor.
it's now been 4 years since it was announced that Metroid Prime 4 restarted development
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I had to go throughout the game and add these little morph ball doors into every tunnel that crossed rooms. This ensured that Samus won’t roll out of the tunnel before the room is loaded, otherwise she will fall into the void forever. 3/4
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Most times the room should be already loaded by the time you get to the door, but things like the morphball make it so you the player can get there much faster and beat the load times. Sorry, but you gotta wait for the disc to load I'm afraid!
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While at Retro Studios working on Metroid Prime, we had a video conference with Nintendo design including Miyamoto. We were going over one of my miniboss designs and Miyamoto had a few questions for me and he called me Zoid-o-san which I thought was amazing.
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During my World of Warcraft raid last night, the healers explained they use raid frames that are sorted alphabetically. My character name is Zoid.
This explains why I die a lot.
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Elon was interviewed tonight by Ron Baron and he mentioned the $8 thing as a tool to fight bots. I don’t think the monthly charge for a tick mark will fight bots effectively. At Valve, we charged for Counterstrike and when you got banned you had to buy the game again.
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It wasn't until we had plotted out the random number distribution with the snow effect that we truly realized how bad the default random number generator was. It was crazy that it was the snow that showed us to make use of a better one. 4/4
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Metroid Prime Dev Stories
#14
: Jack Mathews discusses the performance considerations when making the different visors in Metroid Prime.
Metroid Prime Dev - 60fps Visors. I get asked a lot how we held 60fps with four visors. The short answer is to make one visor the "baseline," and make sure the others perform as well or better, with tech or design. 1/7
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When we first started making the 2D styled morph ball areas, they were connected to various rooms with tunnels. They worked well until our testers started beating the load of the next room and would fall out of the world. 2/4
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I worked with senior design to pick the particular red color, whether hitting blocks, bosses or enemies in the game. The same red was used ensure it was clear when the player is doing damage. It's this consistency that helps players understand clearly what’s happening. 4/4
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It's been an amazing three plus decades of making games. I've loved every minute of it and I'm looking forward to stepping away.
For now.
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This is why in rooms with multiple exits, only one door can be open at a time. We went with the design of the blue force field on the doors that fades when shot to indicate the door is “ready” to open, but has to wait until the room behind is loaded.
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Dota 2 has been out for 12 years (starting from its unveil at Gamescom 2011). 7 billion matches over 12 years is approximately 18 matches per second over the entire life time of the game so far.
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A world layer state is represented by a single bit in the save game. There are only a few hundred world layers in the whole game, so it ends up requiring just under ~50 bytes to represent them all. The remaining bytes in the save game are health, missile count, etc. 4/5
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This library fixed so many issues with memory fragmentation and basically allowed the size of our rooms to be much larger. This resulted in letting us build a better game. 4/4
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While out and about this month I figured it was a good time to wear my Metroid Prime hat. It's 20 years old too!
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Great review of the re-master from MVG. He mentions "doorgate." He highlights one of the big issues I have with them in that they appear over saturated which causes them to look a bit washed out.
Overall he loved the re-master and recommends it!
Also it's Tallon IV, MVG. :P
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I'm guessing Prime 4 is probably going to be a headline launch title for Switch 2 (or whatever they are calling the next console).
Can't wait to see what my formers coworkers are cooking up.
This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct
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Creative use of the game physics and movement that results in acquiring items out of order allows creative exploration of the game world. Sequence breaks like this are very much part of Metroid. 4/4
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Metroid Prime Dev Story
#7
: Here's a bonus story from my friend Jack Mathews, Technical Lead on Metroid Prime. He explains why we had to put a GameCube the freezer to test a hardware bug. Thanks Jack!
Metroid Prime Game Dev Story - The One Where We Fridged a GameCube. Shortly after Prime shipped, Nintendo told us that a "bad batch" of GameCube CPU's shipped, and apparently Prime was the only game that misbehaved on them. We saw videos and it was clear what was going on. 1/7
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The first Dota 2 International was 10 years ago today. We showed Dota 2 first at Gamescom in Germany, on the other side of the planet, with an alpha game and held the first million dollar video game tournament and had 275,000 people go through the booth!
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Each room in Metroid Prime has a set of world layers--these define which objects spawn when the room is loaded. E.g. it’s world layers that change Flaahgra’s room from having a boss to Chozo ghosts and an artifact when you return later. 2/5
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The speedrunning community wrote up on how the maze works here, There’s also a tool to determine which maze you have based on the starting positions. The community is amazing! 5/5
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When the snow effect was first implemented we noticed there were large empty streaks in the falling snow! It was was quickly realized that the snow was basically a 3D plot of the deficiency of the default random number generator that came with the compiler. 2/4
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The big one is when I made this little Capture the Flag mod for Quake called Threewave CTF. A few months later I found myself working for id Software (John Carmack was my boss!) and helping make QuakeWorld. That was a bit of a whirlwind.
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As you can see in the clip below as I’m fighting the Baby Sheegoth. My shots are reflected when I’m not doing any damage, but there’s a red glow on the Sheegoth when I’m hitting the right area to damage it. 3/4
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We quickly switched to a using a better random algorithm via a linear congruential generator. It’s still quite fast and generates a far better distribution of numbers. The snow fell into place and looked much more evenly distributed. 3/4
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World layers are also used for items, whenever you pick up an energy tank or missile expansion, they are on a separate world layer that is disabled once the item is acquired. If that layer wasn’t disabled, the item would be there next time the room is loaded. 3/5
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We licensed an open source decompression library that allows allocation of a single decompressed sized block then load the compressed copy into the upper section of the memory block and *decompress it in place* overwriting the compressed copy. 3/4
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These tests with new players helped improve the game greatly. They provided clear feedback in how to communicate the game world to the player. It resulted in a lot of simple design changes that we incorporated throughout the game. 5/5
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I joined Valve in 2008. My first day there I was invited to play test their latest game. It was Left 4 Dead. I remember exiting the first building and being swarmed by 30 zombies at once! I'd never seen that before in an FPS and it was incredible!
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Unveiled Dota 2 at Gamescom in 2011 holding the first million dollar game tournament on a alpha game while 30,000 people pass through the booth over 2 days was insane. We pulled it off, gave Na'vi the first million dollar prize ever in a video game and Dota 2 exploded from there.
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Heh first Steam Deck experience. I like the early update message.
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This allows a larger horizontal distance traversal than a normal jump. Using this momentum lets Samus catch the edge of the cliff beside her ship and get the Space Jump early upon landing. 3/4
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And finally, helping bring back one of my favorite games of all time, World of Warcraft Classic. Millions of players got play it again or for the first time. Oh, and making sure no one was prepared for Burning Crusade Classic.
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We learned so much from these observations. We’d often see testers get stuck in rooms that had morphball tunnel exits--they won’t notice them. This resulted in putting big spotlights over those entrances to make them stand out as a path. 2/5
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Originally both back steps were nearly the same color. We changed them to different textures and improved lighting. Our next set of testers noticed it immediately. The steps are directly ahead in the clip below. 4/5
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The GameCube didn’t have shaders as we know them now, it has a TEV (TExture enVironment unit) that could blend colors. I realized we needed a consistent design for the color blends. 2/4
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Most programmers know once the compressed copy is loaded in memory then space is allocated to decompress into. This means we need the memory for both the compressed and decompressed copy. The GameCube has 24MB of RAM and having both was too expensive. 2/4
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Just to see how much this crazy little
#SteamDeck
machine can do, I installed Windows 10 on an SD card, booted from it then installed World of Warcraft and plugged in an external monitor and keyboard+mouse. It runs WoW at 60fps at 1080p on the external monitor. Very playable!
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@jack_mathews
hardcoded the different elevator cut scenes into the game--its not a “room” at all. They also feature crossfades since it had fixed rendering, one of the only places we could afford to render overlapped scenes! 5/5
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The world size limit was due to floating point precision. If Samus got too far from the origin her movement would start stuttering since the values would get too large. 2/5
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Our testers often couldn’t figure out how to get up to the bridge leading to the Arboretum. After they acquired the morphball and returned to the Main Plaza in the Chozo Ruins they didn’t notice the steps in the back to cross the bridge. 3/5
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This results in 300 different mazes that can be generated in the Central Dynamo room. The maze also features two obstacles along the route in the form of water puddles that must be bombed to short out the nearby nodes and open the path. 4/5
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The GameCube doesn’t have any virtual memory and everything is allocated from the physical RAM. The elevator loads caused all memory to be freed between the worlds, cleaning up any fragmentation. 4/5
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This sideways strafe jump sets a horizontal velocity on the player that continues to circle around the target while locked on. But if you unlock the target just as the strafe jump starts, Samus keeps the horizontal momentum without the lock on pull. 2/4
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Minor correction: The enemy in this clip is the Scatter Bombu, not the Pulse Bombu. I couldn't remember the name of the enemy so I Googled around and got the wrong one!
It was bugging me so I had to load up the game and walk over to Phendrana Drifts and scan it again.
In this clip as Samus approaches the Pulse Bombu, the screen fills with static to show interference with her visor. As we worked on this a big issue is the memory use of the noise texture. The Gamecube only has 24MB of RAM, so every texture has to be carefully considered.
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Cheaters just bought the game again and keep coming back.
Twitter bots will focus mostly on compromising accounts and also paying or using fraud to pay the $8. It won’t stop bots and spam, it just moves the goalposts.
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I'm so glad I got to work with Android Jones on Metroid Prime and it's sequel. I would visit his office often to see what he was working on because it was always amazing. One of the most talented coworkers I've had the opportunity to work with.
As Metroid Prime turns 20, we speak to the concept artist who brought the trilogy to life - and was even dubbed Retro Studios' 'secret weapon'
#Repost
#Metroid
#RetroStudios
#Nintendo
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When designing the room for the power bomb upgrade, I suggested a randomly generated maze for the morphball that players would have to solve. I quickly wrote up the algorithm I remembered from my early days. 2/5
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For the sound banks, the MusyX sound system can stream music but it couldn’t for sound effects. Each world had a different set of sounds that were loaded while the elevator cut scene is running. 3/5
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I wanted to ensure that the maze was of sufficient length, so I wrote a tool that would generate and then solve the maze. I picked 300 random seeds that the solver indicated at least 75% of the maze was required to be traversed. 3/5
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Blizzard recently did an internal company Q&A about its new work policies such as return-to-office. During the discussion, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra referred to Q&A and customer service workers as "not long-term disciplines".
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Threewave CTF for Quake is back! I've been working with id and Bethesda to bring it to the Quake remaster. With many of the original CTF maps, support for bots and playable on consoles too. The update is live now!
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Twitter, now owned by a billionaire nutjob.
WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, all lie to you and you’re just a data farm.
TikTok, all your data belong to China.
Mastodon, the Linux desktop of socials.
Social media was a mistake.
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This is such an incredibly naïve and short sighted way to view workers. When I was working with Nintendo of America's QA team, I worked with some of the best testers ever. Nintendo (at the time) treated its QA team as a full career path with outstanding skill and professionalism.
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It was a very challenging port because as the documentary shows, lots of Valve engineers were from Microsoft so there was a lot of Windows specific code in the game. I managed to sort it out with the great help of
@yahnbernier
and multiplayer shipped with Linux server support!
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This has to mean we get a season 2?
@neilhimself
Nielsen Streaming Top 10: ‘The Sandman’ Overthrows ‘Stranger Things’ at No. 1, ‘Uncharted’ Jumps to No. 2
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