Anyone who lived through the GameCube era remembers the impact of the Metroid Prime trilogy, which took Samus Aran into first person without losing the exploration spirit of the series. That is why the January 2019 news landed like a bucket of cold water: in a video, Shinya Takahashi, manager of Nintendo’s development division (EPD), explained that Metroid Prime 4 had not reached the expected quality and that development would be restarted.
“We decided to re-examine the development structure and change it.”
“More specifically, we decided to have the producer, Kensuke Tanabe, work closely with the studio that developed the original Metroid Prime series, Retro Studios in the United States of America, and we restarted development.”
Takahashi apologized to fans but argued that the decision was in favor of the game’s quality. Watch the video:
The game had been announced with a teaser at E3 2017, with the information that Retro would not be involved. In February 2018, Eurogamer revealed that the project was with Bandai Namco Studios, in Japan and Singapore. Now everything was going back to the hands of those who made the originals, with Tanabe, the trilogy’s producer, in charge.
What came next
It was a long wait. The first trailer, with the subtitle Beyond, appeared on June 18, 2024, and the Nintendo Switch 2 version was confirmed in April 2025. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond came out on December 4, 2025, 18 years after Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, on Switch and Switch 2. It received generally positive reviews, with praise for the environments and the Switch 2 visuals, and passed one million copies. It was the last Nintendo game Tanabe worked on, as he himself announced in January 2026.
Where to buy
Source: Nintendo.
Zé Cartucho
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