Trivia / Metroid

• Dummied Out:
  • Samus uses an Ambidextrous Sprite, but a unique set of unused left-facing sprites remain in the game's data. These sprites can also be seen in the game's Japanese commercial.
  • A Fake Ridley appears in the code as a functional enemy with its own sprites, but does not show up in the game itself. Like Fake Kraid, it is a recolored Ridley that dies to one missile or Screw Attack.
• Game Mod: A lot. One that adds a lot of playability to the original game is Metroid: mOTHER, a Rom Hack which gives updated sprites, a map system, and beam stacking. There is also the Nes Metroid HD Pack that combines the previous Romhack with much better graphics and sound to the point it looks almost like a remake for the Super Nintendo.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: It is often claimed that the Samus Is a Girl twist was more elegantly executed in the Japanese version by referring to Samus with gender-neutral pronouns in the manual. Supposedly, the English manual's use of male pronouns is an example of clumsy localization. In reality, however, the Japanese manual goes out of its way to refer to Samus with male pronouns several times.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Samus was originally going to be able to crawl, but the developers found it difficult to animate her crawling with the limited technology they had to work with. So her famous ability to morph into a ball was conceived.
• Throw It In!: The idea of Samus being a woman wasn't conceived until partway through development, when a developer told the others that it would be cool if the person inside the suit was female.
• Working Title: It was originally going to be called "Space Hunter", and, oddly enough, another Famicom game with that exact title and a very similar premise was released a month later.

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