It was already quite a shock announcement for Nintendo to finally reveal that Metroid Prime 4 is currently being developed, but very few would’ve ever called the follow up announcement that was made in a later Treehouse stream in which Metroid: Samus Returns was revealed. Yoshio Sakamoto—a producer who’s worked on a number of Metroid games in the past—was a pivotal part of this surprise project, and he recently shared more thoughts on the development of this game in an interview with Kotaku.

One of the questions asked was why it’s taken so long for Nintendo to produce another 2D Metroid game, given that the last one came out on the Game Boy Advance. Sakamoto just said that it’s all down to “timing”:

I’m working on other titles outside of Metroid, of course. I’ve been fairly busy with stuff. There’s a lot of timing involved when all the pieces fall into place, and we have the ability to do some of these things we’ve been thinking about for a long time. I guess for us the timing was two years ago. Or now.

Later on, a question was asked regarding how 2D and 3D Metroid games are handled internally at Nintendo. Interestingly enough, Sakamoto said that there is next to no communication between different teams, and that communication is mostly limited to surface level stuff. Here’s what he said:

There’s no close proximity to those things. We’re not really in communication. Obviously we talk about, ‘Hey what’re you guys doing, this is what we’re doing, let’s not release these [games] all at the same time, or hey maybe we should release these at the same time.’ There’s that level of communication.

Of course [veteran Nintendo producer Kensuke] Tanabe worked on the Metroid Prime series. And he comes and says, ‘Hey this is what we’re going to be doing,’ and lets us know what’s going on [with his team].

What do you think? Are you glad that they’ve finally decided to make another 2D Metroid, even if it is a remake? What do you think Prime 4 will be like? Drop us a comment in the section below.