Project Otazuno

July 15, 2004

cavemetroid.jpgA few years back a team of pro­gram­mers, artists and mod map­pers decided to brain­storm an idea for a Half-Life mod­i­fi­ca­tion. A mod­i­fi­ca­tion (or mod for short) is basi­cally an exten­sion or add-on to an exist­ing pro­gram which extends the life of the game. Even though Valve released its mas­ter­piece 7 years ago, the game has enjoyed a life of its own because of these modifications.

The team included a friend of mine, Adam Smith, whose job was to pro­vide the sound­track to this orig­i­nal mod­i­fi­ca­tion. The mod enti­tled Metroid: Project Otazuno was to be a 3D Metroid game uti­liz­ing the Half-Life engine. Prior to this, Metroid had incured an absence and fans of the series were sali­vat­ing for some­thing new, a Metroid game uti­liz­ing the lat­est technology.

Sev­eral months into pro­duc­tion, includ­ing devis­ing beau­ti­ful lev­els, art­work and music, the project was halted. The rea­son? Nin­tendo of Amer­ica in con­junc­tion with game devel­op­ers Retro Stu­dios were work­ing on a top secret project. That project was a Metroid game (Metroid Prime) planned for release on their newest con­sole Game­cube. The Half-Life Metroid team received an advanced warn­ing to “cease and desist” all pro­duc­tion on the modification.

All legal rea­sons aside, it’s a shame that all the hard work was set aside and will never be expe­ri­enced by the pub­lic. The beau­ti­ful art­work, amaz­ing lev­els and music now reside as “aban­don­ware” within the kartooner.com server.

How­ever, as an exclu­sive I’m pre­sent­ing to you Metroid: Project Otazuno. Take a look at the screen­shots (and the one included in this arti­cle). It’s eerie how the Half-Life Metroid ship resem­bles Prime’s ship and a vari­ety of other ideas from the mod seemed to influ­ence Retro’s version. 

7 comments

That’s very cool indeed! It’s always fun to see these old aban­doned projects again after a while.

I was the lead on USCM: Infes­ta­tion, an Aliens TC for Half-Life, which of course got foxed. There’s shots from one of the lev­els on my site, but per­haps I should put up our old sites as well… Yeah, I think I’ll do that.

by Michael on July 16, 2004 at 2:50 pm. Reply #

Awe­some, Michael. I do remem­ber hear­ing about that par­tic­u­lar mod way back when, and then noth­ing. Sim­i­lar to the fate of Project Otazuno.

As you said though, it’s always nice to see these ‘aban­doned’ projects archived on the web.

By the way, I’ve played Medal of Honor: AA to death it seems and one of my favorite lev­els (in Spear­head) was in fact Bahn­hof. Great work on that level, I loved the tele­phone wires in par­tic­u­lar. ;)

by kartooner on July 17, 2004 at 11:57 am. Reply #

Hey guys! I was the team leader of this project. The one that got the heads up from Nin­tendo. I can’t believe this. I was just sit­ting here won­der­ing if this site was still around.. And what do I find when I search on Google? An arti­cle about the project. Dirty dirty Nin­tendo. haha! Oh well. I’m work­ing on a Blaster Mas­ter game now. You can see a small teaser screen­shot at :

http://www.jeffluke.com/media/BM.gif

it’s noth­ing much, but I’m keep­ing it 2D just in case Sun­soft of Japan decides they want to yell at me for them mak­ing a new 3d one or some­thing. Who knows. Any­ways, tell Adam I said hi if he hap­pens to remem­ber me. If he wants to work on any projects, have him con­tact me (jeff@jeffluke.com or AIM : canawasian ) You guys are wel­come to as well.

Thanks for bring­ing back good mem­o­ries :)

Jeff Luke — Rad Racer X

by Jeff Luke (radracerx) on April 30, 2005 at 4:23 am. Reply #

How could Nin­tendo legally shut down pro­duc­tion of a free­ware mod?

by Lucas on July 24, 2006 at 11:36 pm. Reply #

No edit fea­ture, so I’m post­ing again. On the archived news page it says:

“Damn we are lucky! I recieved an E-mail just a few days ago stat­ing that if I were to keep with this mod that Nin­tendo would most likely attempt to sue us, So…I did the only thing we could do…I killed the mod..But now, a lit­tle light from above has shined on us! We can’t get sued! We aren’t sell­ing the prod­uct, and so we aren’t sell­ing their copy­righted mate­r­ial which is what copy­right­ing is all about, pro­tected yer goods from being sold and junk like that under some­one elses name. So, I’m very glad to say, WE ARE STILL ALIVE!”

So what hap­pened? Why did they sud­denly have to close down?

by Lucas on July 24, 2006 at 11:43 pm. Reply #

Lucas, I would con­tact Jeff Luke, the team leader of the Otazuno project and see what he has to say about it.

I wasn’t privy to the exact details other than they were even­tu­ally pushed to shut down the project by Nintendo.

Regard­less, it’s sad to see so much work end prematurely.

by kartooner on July 27, 2006 at 4:45 pm. Reply #

Hey guys, sorry to get back so late. Basi­cally, they told us that it doesn’t mat­ter if we’re not sell­ing any­thing, that we are using copy­righted mate­r­ial so they could use that against us. They were at least nice about it though. They gave us a cou­ple chances to quit. I’d love to start some­thing again though, pos­si­bly with the source engine. Dunno how to get a hold of the old team any­more these days.

Any­ways, take care everyone!

Jeff Luke
5thCell Media

by Jeff Luke on December 12, 2006 at 6:24 am. Reply #

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