No one knew it at Nintendo, but 38 years ago, in August 1986, they were about to create a franchise that would survive decades. Metroid was a hit in Japanese stores, even though the name itself doesn’t mean anything: it’s a simple combination of the words “metro” (yes, like the subway) and “android.” Oh, and did you know that its most memorable moment, when it revealed that there is a woman under the armor, was a coincidence? At one point, a developer proposed it, it was put into the game as a curiosity, and this is how Samus Aran continues to live on to this day.
Football and Metroid
The curious thing is that the script referred to Samus all the time as “he” to preserve the surprise ending. As a reference for the pixels, they took Sigourney Weaver in ‘Alien’ (the whole game, in general, draws heavily from this science fiction icon) and Kim Basinger in ‘Nine and a Half Weeks.’ Who would have thought?
It is less known that its name is based on the greatest soccer player in history, Pelé. It turns out that Hiroji Kiyotake, the character designer, was a big fan of the king of sport, and decided to name it after the athlete. In other words, “Edson Arantes do Nascimento.” Not only does the “Aran” come from there, but Kiyotake believed that her name was “Samus Arantes.”
By the way, if you want to know the whole story of Samus, you had better learn Japanese because it is in a manga that was published between 2003 and 2004, and serves as a prequel to the first Metroid. The good part is that there are still no official movies to add to the canon, although considering the success of ‘Super Mario Bros’ the key word is “still.”
