Metroid, featuring gaming's most famous gender reveal, turns 40 today
The thing about videogames really ramping up in the 80s is that the 2020s are throwing up a lot of big anniversaries, making more work for me. Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Nintendo’s Metroid series, games that are simultaneously groundbreaking but also haven’t actually got a lot of records attached to them. Thus, celebrating Samus Aran’s birthday for the Guinness World Records website is my toughest challenge yet. Oh don’t worry, I’ll do it.
The first Metroid was developed in 1986 by Nintendo's famous R&D1 division (a heavyweight in classic Japanese development that is the font of the Donkey Kong series and the actual Game Boy, one of the most famous and successful handheld consoles in this history of ever). Metroid wasn’t only a smash hit, but went on to be very influential, and the series is still going as of 2025's Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
The hero of Metroid is Samus Aran, a mercenary in a very cool metal exoskeleton suit that has a big cannon arm. This presumably makes eating biscuits quite difficult, but obliterating enemies quite easy. Many of the games in the Metroid series involve Samus tracking down and defeating space pirates, or monsters the space pirates are trying to weaponise (the titular metroids fall into this latter category).
Samus and Metroid blazed a famous trail, as one of the two games that gave rise to the subgenre known as the “Metroidvania” – the other of course being Konami’s Castlevania series. A Metroidvania is a platformer, usually a side-on 2D one, with a large map that you unlock in a non-linear fashion. Like, you find a door right near the start that you can’t open until you’ve collected the magic door opening ability from the other side of the map first. Or later on you’ll be really deep in the lava dungeon area and find a lift that takes you right back to the start again, using your newly-acquired Staff of Lift Operation. That kind of thing.
There’s a lot of retracing your steps, but with new knowledge and skills every time. It’s a hugely influential way of designing a game. If I was being cheeky I would argue that a Soulslike game is just a fancied up Metroidvania (I won’t because people will get cross if I do that).
Sadly for the purposes of this article, the most critically acclaimed Metroid game is 2002’s Metroid Primeby Retro Studios (it was also the best-selling Metroid until 2021’s Metroid Dread snatched that crown). I say sadly because it’s the first Metroid game to use 3D graphics and be in first-person, meaning people have passionate arguments over whether Metroid Prime is considered a Metroidvania.
So where does that leave us with Metroid records? I’ll be honest, when I was looking through our archives, I thought Metroid and Samus would have at least a couple of “first” records, but there’s an issue I’ve found with games from the mid-late 80s and 90s. Maybe they perfected something, or were otherwise influential, but without technically being the first.
Samus, for example, isn’t the first female character in game by a long shot, but the reveal that she's a girl took people by surprise. At the end of the original Metroid, if you’d beaten the game in a certain time limit, her power suit disappeared to reveal that she’d been a blonde lady the whole time! Many gamers weren’t expecting this after playing as a big gun-toting badass for several hours.
There isn’t a way I can quantify “most surprising gender reveal in a videogame”, but I do think it makes one record Samus has pretty ironic. In Metroid II: Return of Samus, Samus’s ship is a giant replica of her helmet, making her the first videogame protagonist to have a “faceship”. And it’s not even her actual surprising face.
So good for you, Samus. You may not technically be the first lady of gaming, but you hold a special place in the hearts of many players out there. Long may your adventures continue! And mine will too, because this is one of many gaming anniversaries coming up this summer.