After nine games, thirteen million sales and endless waves of enemies sent to monster heaven, this much we know about Samus Aran: she's used to being alone.

Maybe that's why nobody's heard Samus speak a single word in over two decades of free-form pirate extermination. Her text dialogue rarely gives much away, either. Even her gender was kept secret throughout the first game, backed by an instruction booklet that told his backstory. Years later, we'd learn she's an orphan twice over, parents killed by a vicious pirate dragon named Ridley, and then raised by the Chozo, a now-extinct alien race. It was the Chozo who equipped Samus with physics-defying combat armor, making her the Galactic Federation's go-to girl for suicide missions in the dark, lonely corners of the universe. Samus was more than willing to oblige. It gave her prime opportunities to exact missile-heavy vengeance on the pirates who murdered her family.And that's how we met her. Samus Aran appeared on the surface of planet Zebes, an agile tank on two legs with a cannon on her arm and a contract to fulfill. Kill the pirate leader Mother Brain and destroy all research into a parasitic creature created by the Chozo, Samus's own benefactors, as the ultimate bio-weapon.They were called Metroids, and they were about to become her life's work.Originally published August 23, 2007.August, 1986. After a shaky start full of hardware malfunctions and product recalls, Nintendo's Famicom owned the home console market. They had a three-year head start on SEGA's Master System. A 33-year old phenom named Shigeru Miyamoto successfully put the industry crash of '83 firmly in the rearview mirror with back-to-back hits, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Atari was MIA.Even better, the Famicom Disk System peripheral was doing great guns in Japan. Essentially an external disk drive, it plugged into the Famicom's cartridge slot and ran games off proprietary 3" floppy disks. They were cheaper to produce and sold for 3/5ths the price of SEGA's cartridge games... less, if bought from a vending machine. They also provided a whopping 128K storage capacity, as opposed to the 4K limit of Atari 2600 cartridges. Zelda, the first Famicom Disk game, presented a gigantic world full of secret rooms and dungeons to explore. After that, simple Baseball and Golf games alone just weren't going to cut it. Management tasked Miyamoto with building a disk-run sequel to Super Mario Bros. The job of creating new hit Famicom Disk games fell to the legendary R&D1 team, lead by Miyamoto's old mentor: Gunpei Yokoi.The one-time janitor was a certified hit-maker from Nintendo's toy days that triumphed again with Game & Watch, an early mobile game series. Yokoi produced Miaymoto's first arcade successes, Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., but as Miyamoto edged into rock star territory, Yokoi-san's prestige faded. This new assignment would prove R&D1 still had moves.He put three men on the job. Makoto Kanoh created the characters and scenario. Hiroji Kiyotake designed Samus, the titular fanged jellyfish, bosses Ridley and Kraid, Mother Brain, et all. Yoshio Sakamoto directed. The game would be a shooter that combined the platforming of Super Mario Bros. with Zelda's non-linear exploration, plus a unique element all its own: atmosphere. Yokoi was a big believer in applied technology. He wasn't interested in reinventing wheels... he just made better wheels.Meaner wheels, too. Where Mario and Zelda were sunny, happy games, Samus Aran's journey took its emotional cues from Ridley Scott's 1979 horror opus, "Alien." By coincidence, James Cameron's "Aliens" arrived that very summer, with Sigourney Weaver in the bug hunting lead. It struck a chord."We were partway through the development process," recalls Sakamoto, "when one of the staff members said Hey, wouldn't that be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?"The vote carried, and on August 6, Metroid was released for the Famicom Disk System.Players take the role of bounty hunter Samus Aran, tracking space pirates -- not the yo-ho-ho scallywag kind -- though a dark labyrinth infested with creepy hostiles. The sense of isolation is palpable. Nobody is coming to help you. Surviving "Zebeth" means exploring for better weapons and power-ups, many vital for reaching new areas. But the gold star goes to one ability in particular: Samus can collapse into a sphere and roll through tight passages at will, an unbearably cool signature move. The morph ball required far less animating than a cyborg crawling on all fours, and Yokoi's team took full advantage of their very clever shortcut.The game is long, too. Reaching end-boss Mother Brain can take hours of dedicated play. Luckily, Famicom disks were rewritable, allowing for three save slots that made the whole affair possible. Metroid took risks, and threw a wicked curveball. Mother Brain isn't much tougher to kill than the next one-eyed brain in a glass jar, but instead of the standard congratulations screen, defeating her lights the fuse on a self-destruct sequence. Three minutes to escape the hole you've spent hours burrowing into is enough to freak the steadiest gamer. But the real bombshell comes after your clean getaway; Metroid presented one of five possible endings -- unheard of -- based on your finish time.Endings three, four and five put Metroid on a whole new level. Samus pops her armor, lets her long hair down, and strips down to her purple skivvies. All that mayhem. All that badassery. All along, you'd been playing as a girl.Backed by Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka's often eerie score, Metroid stood apart as its own animal, a uniquely superior gaming experience. Gunpei Yokoi and his R&D1 team had set out to launch a franchise equal to Miyamoto's, something they could call their own. Anyone would've said they'd pulled it off. Big time.A sequel wouldn't arrive for another five years.As a series, Metroid gets a lot right, but not the timing.Two months before Metroid's release, the first 128K cartridge game reached stores, effectively nailing the coffin shut on the Famicom Disk System. Samus was ported to cartridge a full year later, becoming a million-unit seller on the Famicom's North American cousin, the Nintendo Entertainment System. But the damage was done. Metroid never had the hope of reaching Mario or Zelda-like sales figures, or even coming close. Olympus was out of reach.This would become a recurring theme. Samus Aran was the youngest of three, and the most likely to get left behind. R&D1 moved forward on other projects.Chief among them, Gunpei Yokoi's new creation: the Game Boy. Nintendo's monochromatic handheld gaming system dominated the market, even outselling the NES. Two years into its lifecycle, Yokoi was in a stellar position to create a Metroid sequel... R&D1's own game on R&D1's own platform. Kanoh and Kiyotake returned (the latter now co-directing with Hiroyuki Kimura) and Metroid II: The Return of Samus went to America in 1991.If Metroid owed a lot to "Alien," Metroid II was a definite nod to "Aliens." The oft-stung Galactic Federation was done taking chances, hiring Samus to commit genocide on the Metroids at their origin point, planet SR-388. Advancing is based solely on racking up Metroid pelts, a more linear approach that put some fans off. Samus, however, doesn't disappoint. She comes to the party in a brand-new gunship, loaded with new toys to augment her old arsenal of missiles, bombs, ice and wave beams. Three-beamed spazers and wall-penetrating plasma beams make their first appearance, and the morph ball ups the coolness with new wall-crawling abilities.The Game Boy forced changes. Most noticeably, demonstrating Samus's armor upgrades with a color switch wouldn't play on a monochrome screen. Instead, the Varia suit now came with huge 90's rounded shoulder pads that would remain a staple part of her look. Save Modules were also introduced, replacing the NES Metroid's password saves. Gamers said goodbye to favored cheat codes like "Narpas Sword" and "Justin Bailey," which armed Samus to the teeth while stripping her down to a bathing suit... though never, contrary to fanboy dreams and many a rumor, to her birthday suit.Anyway, SR-388 requires heavy armor to beat an entire Metroid evolutionary ladder, leading up to a reptilian Metroid Queen. Dispatching her, Samus only has one target left... a small hatchling Metroid. In a wild twist, the creature imprints on Samus and, despite resolving to erase the species, Samus spares it. There is some humanity in there after all.Hailed at the time, Metroid II suffers in retrospect from the limits of its platform and its too-linear concept. Nevertheless, R&D1 put a successful sequel on the shelves, added now-mandatory elements to the series, and gave needed depth to both Samus and her universe.They also got what they really wanted... an extended trial run for the big show.