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.