20 Things You DIDN'T Know About Super Metroid
21 Things You Didn't Know About Super Metroid
Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we’re going to look at 21 things you didn’t know about “Super Metroid!” Spoilers ahead. Let’s get into it!
Infinite Bomb Jump
Bomb Jumping has become a classic “Metroid” technique, and you can actually use it to fly! By laying bombs in Morph Ball mode with precise timing, you can use the explosions to blast yourself into any direction. It’s one of the first advanced tricks players learn, and you’ll be using it to reach certain high-up areas in the game. However, since you can keep doing it as you go, it’ll even let you fly when done right, and this is the lesser known “Infinite Bomb Jump.” It’s so hard to do consistently that even the people who know about it won't do it.
Embarrass Ridley
Most players assume that the opening battle against Ridley on Ceres Station is a scripted loss designed to set the plot in motion… While Ridley will always escape with the baby Metroid, you can actually win the fight if you’re skilled enough! By dealing enough damage to Ridley, you can force him to drop the baby Metroid’s container and see him retreat in a panic! It doesn’t change the narrative or affect the story in any way, but you do get to completely embarrass Ridley, Samus’s arch-nemesis, right from the get-go.
Crystal Flash
If you find yourself on the brink of death with no energy tanks left, Samus has a secret emergency healing ability called the “Crystal Flash.” To do it, you need at least 10 Missiles, 10 Super Missiles, and 11 Power Bombs. With your health below 50 and your reserve tanks empty, select a Power Bomb, drop into a Morph Ball, and hold the L and R buttons along with Down on the D-Pad. When you press and hold the fire button, Samus restores her health to full at the cost of her ammo!
Wall Jump
The wall jump is one of Samus’s most versatile tools, but the game is surprisingly quiet about it. Unlike your missiles or beams, you never find an item that unlocks this ability; it’s something Samus can do from the very start. With that said, there is the Etecoon pit at the bottom of Brinstar, where they’ll demonstrate it to you so you can escape. The thing is, this is an optional area, and it’s the only place in the game where wall jumping is mandatory! As a result, many players don’t know you can do it right from the start of the game, or that you can even do it at all.
Save the Animals
During the frantic escape from Zebes at the end of the game, every second counts. But if you take a detour back to the room where you first find the Bombs, you can do one last heroic act. By shooting the wall to the right, you can free the Etecoons and the Dachora. If you do this, you’ll see a tiny pixel-sized speck of light flying away from the planet during the final cutscene. While it might be optional, it’s widely considered canon since these creatures reappear in later “Metroid” titles!
Stand up during the Mother Brain’s Brain Beam
The final battle against the Mother Brain has a scripted sequence where Samus is brought to her knees by a devastating “Brain Beam.” However, you can actually break this moment. If you enter the fight with at least 700 Energy and unequip both the Varia and Gravity Suits, the math behind the damage calculation glitches out. Instead of being pinned down, Samus will be able to stand up and move freely while Mother Brain continues her scripted attack. You can even walk around and shoot while the game tries to force you into the “defeated” animation!
One-shot Draygon
Draygon is one of the more intimidating bosses in the game, both visually and mechanically. But sneaky players who read the game manual will know that he has a hilarious, secret weakness. In it, the method is a little vague, but what you do is fire at the turrets in the arena, then let Draygon grab you and fly you around, you can equip the Grapple Beam and fire it at one of the broken turrets. The current will travel through Samus’s suit and into Draygon, frying him and taking him out immediately.
Largest Console Cartridge
When “Super Metroid” was released in 1994, it wasn’t just a masterpiece design-wise; it was technically impressive. At the time of its launch, it was the largest game ever released on a Super Nintendo cartridge, weighing in at a then-massive 24 Megabits. This extra space was necessary to accommodate the game’s incredibly detailed sprite work, atmospheric sound design, and the vast, interconnected map. It was surpassed only two months after its North American release with the release of “Super Street Fighter 2,” which weighed in at 32 Megabits!
45-degree Shinespark
The Shinespark itself is already a secret move, and most players that do know of the Shinespark, know that you can move Samus horizontally or vertically. The thing is, you can actually do a 45-degree diagonal Shinespark. You won’t be using it much, but this trick has a very specific application near Samus’s gunship. By performing a perfectly timed diagonal Shinespark at the landing site, you can clip through a wall that leads to a series of rooms which you’re only meant to access later, after returning from the wrecked ship. If you wanna get really crazy, you should try doing a diagonal Shinespark mid-air, which is one of the hardest things in any “Metroid” game!
The VAR Glitch
If you’ve ever wanted to turn Samus into a god, you should consider the VAR glitch. It’s relatively simple, it just bypasses the game’s restrictions and allows you to equip every beam type simultaneously, including the incompatible Spazer and Plasma beams. The result is what is referred to in the “Metroid” community as the “murder beam” or the VAR glitch. Unfortunately, you become so powerful that you end up putting such a strain on the Super Nintendo’s hardware that it would cause the game to crash and glitch. You don’t even have to remain in the same area after firing it, since the beam will leave an invisible hitbox that keeps dealing damage, instantly taking out any spawning enemies.
Kim Basinger
Samus Aran is a mix of diverse pop culture influences. While her Power Suit is pure sci-fi, her appearance underneath was inspired by two major Hollywood stars. Director Yoshio Sakamoto confirmed that her look was inspired by Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from “Aliens” and Kim Basinger’s roles in films like “9 1⁄2 Weeks.” They wanted to create a character who would be feminine but never objectified. They even hid her gender and referred to her as a male in the manual, to give the reveal at the end of the original “Metroid” more weight. Even her name has a surprising origin; “Aran” was taken from Edson Arantes do Nascimento–better known as the massive soccer legend Pelé.
Mockball
The “Machball,” more commonly referred to as the “Mockball,” is arguably the most famous tech in the “Super Metroid” community. It allows Samus to maintain her full running speed while in Morph Ball form. To pull it off, you jump, begin a dash in mid-air, and morph just as you hit the ground while holding the run button. It’ll maintain your horizontal momentum, letting you roll under low passages at high speed or zip over Pit Blocks before they crumble. It’s really a physics oversight, but it fits so well into gameplay that it’s led many to believe it might’ve been a secretly intentional mechanic.
Early Ice Beam
Obtaining the Ice Beam usually requires the Speed Booster to clear descending gates, but as you can tell by now, we’ve got various ways of bypassing these things. If you want to, you can Mockball across this room and completely forgo the need for a Speed Booster, allowing you to do one of the bigger sequence breaks in the game, if not the biggest. Obtaining the Ice Beam this early is a huge advantage, not just because it allows you to freeze enemies, but because it allows you to sequence break even further.
Early Power Bomb
What really makes “Super Metroid” fun is how much you can change the game with sequence breaks, since they allow you to play the game in your own order. Once you know how to get the Ice Beam early, it really takes off. In the Red Tower in Brinstar, you can use the Ice Beam to freeze the Rippers to help you reach the top. There’s a cooler and more difficult way to do this though! You see, you can actually do a series of frame-perfect wall jumps and just get up that way. The game yet again unintentionally rewards you for being good at it.
Blue Suit Samus
The “Blue Suit” glitch is very simply put, the coolest Samus can look in “Super Metroid.” You can only trigger this in the Draygon boss fight, in which you must get caught in his mucus, and then initiate a dash. By crouching and Shinesparking through Draygon’s belly, the boss dies instantly, and Samus is left with a permanent blue aura and a trail of after-images. Mechanically, what it’s really doing is allowing you to store the Speed Boost indefinitely, letting you run incredibly fast… until you crouch, which turns it into a Shinespark!
Godzilla
If you thought the roars of Zebes sounded familiar, you’ve likely watched “Godzilla.” That’s because the sound team for “Super Metroid” didn’t create all their monster noises from scratch, but actually sampled the sound effects directly from classic “Godzilla” movies. For instance, the roars of Mother Brain are actually a modified version of Mothra’s iconic cry. Meanwhile, the sounds of both Draygon and Ridley were sampled from Anguirus. It’s probably not too much of a reach to assume a lot of the monster designs were inspired by “Godzilla” and the Kaiju genre too!
The Crocomire
Crocomire does suffer a relatively gruesome 16-bit death in the acid below his arena, but there’s actually a different way, which most people don’t know about. Technically, the boss’s tongue is a separate entity with its own health bar, but it was designed to be invincible. You know what they say though, “if it bleeds we can kill it!” At least, that’s what the person who discovered this was thinking. If you hit the tongue with between 82 and 100 Power Bombs, it will actually die. There’s just a few problems with that, such as not even being able to carry that many Power Bombs! So to pull it off, you’d either have to use glitches, or simply, albeit slowly, farm more Power Bombs during the fight itself from Crocomire’s projectiles. It’s so tedious that this hidden interaction became an entire speedrunning category.
The Opening Voice
The seemingly synthesized voice that sets the stage for “Super Metroid” is one of the most crisp soundbytes of its time. It’s not actually synthesized though! And it’s not from a professional voice actor either. The lines “The last Metroid is in captivity… the galaxy is at peace” were actually recorded by Daniel Owsen. Owsen is a legendary figure at Nintendo of America, mostly known for his work localizing games like “The Legend of Zelda” and “Earthbound.” When the development team needed an English speaker, they simply hit up Owsen because he happened to be in the office at the right time!
Keiko Love
For over two decades, a romantic secret remained hidden in the depths of the Maridia swamp! Developer Yasuhiko Fujii implemented a tribute to his then-girlfriend, Keiko, in the Evir creatures that appear right before the Draygon fight. If you watch their movements closely, they actually trace the letters “Keiko Love” in English. Fujii snuck this into the code late at night while his colleagues were sleeping, and it was never officially documented. The secret only came to light in 2007 through a Japanese interview book, and Western fans didn’t catch wind of it until an English translation surfaced in 2018.
The Debug Room
If you’re struggling with the Golden Torizo, there’s a hidden debug code that turns Samus into a walking tank. To activate it, you must hold the A, B, X, and Y buttons simultaneously while entering the boss room–but only if the Torizo hasn’t been defeated yet. This grants you a massive stockpile with seven Energy Tanks, three Reserve Tanks, and nearly every item in the game. It also enables both the Spazer and Plasma Beams at the same time, which is actually a bit of a problem, since it normally crashes the game!
Unused Room
Where “Super Metroid” shines the most is easily its world design, which would go on to inspire countless other games and even spawn a whole subgenre. Yet, as good as the developers were at world design, they still left out some of it during development. There’s an early, inaccessible room that never made it into the final version. It was discovered via a hand-drawn map used by Nintendo Power’s Game Play Counselors back in the 90s. In the game, the space this room occupied was replaced by the Acid Chozo room!
Did any of these Zebes secrets surprise you? Drop your favorite sequence break in the comments below and subscribe to MojoPlays for more “Metroid” content!
