Metroid fans were given quite the treat in 2021 via the launch of Dread. While it wasn't the Metroid Prime 4 that was first announced in 2017, at least it was a new Metroid game, and a pretty great one. Dread was actually a Metroid game fans had been waiting for even longer than Prime 4. Technically first revealed all the way back in 2006 and rumored to be coming to the DS, devs had to wait more than a decade for the Switch, a system that could handle their vision.
Prime 4 will be next, hopefully, and the Kiwi Talkz podcast has been digging into the history of the first in the Prime series in the meantime. That deep dive includes an interview with David Kirsch, better known as Zoid, who worked on the very first Prime. When assigned to Prime while working for Retro, Zoid thought it might be a good idea to play Super Metroid for the first time.
Zoid loved Super Metroid so much he played it through twice in three days. He then went about including a playable version of it in Prime. However, those of you who played Metroid Prime on GameCube will know even though Zoid achieved that feat in development, Super Metroid wasn't shipped with the final version of the game.
That's because Nintendo stepped in. Zoid had used an unofficial SNES simulator in order to add Super Metroid to Metroid Prime, something Nintendo understandably wasn't okay with. That resulted in its removal, but Nintendo did make a compromise. Since it had created an official NES emulator for the GameCube, the original Metroid was included in Prime instead of Super Metroid. Not quite as good, but still pretty cool, especially for the time.
You now don't need to rely on an imaginative developer to put Super Metroid into a newer Metroid game, nor do you need to dust off your SNES in order to play it. It is one of the many games from Nintendo's past to have been added to its growing NSO library. If you've never played it, do yourself a favor and check it out. In fact, go back and play all the old Metroid games to help fill the gap between now and whenever Prime 4 arrives. It's probably still going to be a while.