’Metroid: Samus Returns’ Isn’t an Action Game—Just Like the ’Alien’ Movies, It’s a Feminist Horror Tale
When Metroid first hit shelves in 1987, the Nintendo game about an alien-killing bounty hunter felt like nothing else. Set on an eerie, alien world, it eschewed the poppy optimism of most ‘80s games for a claustrophobic odyssey set to spare, menacing tones. But its armored hero, Samus Aran, seemed unremarkable—like every other humdrum videogame soldier—until the game’s finale. That’s when Samus stepped out of her space suit and revealed she was a woman, and you had been one as well for as long as you played the game.
The gender-flip was a gag of sorts that relied on the casual sexism of the era, but a closer look at the Metroid series—which recently released Metroid: Samus Returns, a brilliant remake of Metroid II for the 3DS—reveals something else. Metroid isn’t just an action franchise, but a horror game inspired deeply by the Alien movies, and one whose true terror and power are rooted in the female body.
Both Metroid and Alien came by their defining element almost by accident; Metroid was nearly complete when a member of the game development team suggested making Samus female to “surprise” the player. The original 1979 movie Alien had a similar gender-flip: although the hero of the film had been scripted as male, director Ridley Scott decided to change the character to a woman, Ellen Ripley. “She would be the last one you would think would survive,” he explained later. “But she does, not despite her femininity but in some ways because of it.”
Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto described Alien as a “huge influence” on his game, which similarly owes a profound debt to the haunting art of H.R. Giger. His skeletal designs inspired both the multi-mouthed xenomorphs that stalked through the shadows of the series, and the spiny architecture of the alien world in Prometheus, and make their way into the world of Metroid as well. The Chozo statues that offer Samus power-ups bear more than a passing resemblance to the Engineer that Ripley encounters on the abandoned spaceship in Aliens, and the spiky, pincered enemies that creep through its levels evoke a similar insectoid revulsion.
One game literally refers to Metroids as “xenomorphs,” while the evil mini-boss Ridley—who shares a name with Alien’s director—has a distended skull reminiscent of the film’s otherworldly killer. Even the game’s architecture echoed the tense finales of the first two films. Rather than simply proceeding forward towards a goal, Samus was forced to loop backwards through the dangers of its long, forbidding corridors to confront a very feminine villain: Mother Brain.
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