We know that Nintendo can be a little protective of its intellectual properties (now there’s an understatement), but it turns out that the company’s micromanagement was enough to make one artist on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption leave his position at Retro Studios.
That’s according to a recent episode of the Kiwi Talkz podcast, where host Reece Reilly sat down with former Retro and Bethesda world artist Nate Purkeypile to talk about his experience of working on Corruption.
In the interview, Purkeypile described the setup as “not my style”, with Nintendo employees flying in from Japan to request changes to “the smallest details” of production. “These are not people who worked on the games,” Purkeypile clarifies, “these are people from Japan, flying in to micromanage characters and stuff like that”.
While none of these critiques were directly aimed at Purkeypile’s work on the game’s world art, he recalls that the character art teams would consistently be asked to make minute changes, resulting in what he describes as an “unhealthy relationship” between Nintendo and Retro.
I have never liked working with publishers or anything, but this was a whole other level of micromanagement. Like, no way! In my opinion, if you’re not directly working on the game, go away. You can give feedback and guidance, but I don’t think you should be telling the devs what to do. You don’t have all the proper context or framing to actually be giving these critiques and I think it’s completely not how things should be made.
Not to say that Metroid didn’t turn out great, but it didn’t turn out great because some shoulder pad was shifted slightly. I think that’s kind of an unhealthy relationship.
Combined with the comparatively limited power of the Wii, which Purkeypile describes as “stifling for an art career”, this relationship with Nintendo was enough to make the artist leave Retro Studios after working on Corruption for roughly a year and a half.
It doesn’t sound like the easiest working relationship, but we can’t say we’re all that surprised to hear about Nintendo being protective over Samus’ look — and having heard some of the minuscule changes that Sakurai requested on Smash Ultimate, pickiness is far from a rare occurrence.
We’ve attached the relevant clip from the interview at the top of this article, but you can hear the full talk with Nate Purkeypile on the Kiwi Talkz YouTube channel.
If only we had Prime 3 on Switch to see those changes in action… eh, Nintendo? *Nudge, nudge*