Metroid (NES) review "To think that 70% of this game, so familiar to so many players, occupies exactly 0 bytes of data. The glimpses I see of Real Zebes break a spell indeed... It is one thing to understand how a game works, but it is another entirely to see how it work. "

Long ago---before GameFAQs and advent of online gaming communities---it was discovered that if one opens a door in Metroid, stands in said door, and presses the down and up buttons on the directional pad in quick succession, the male character Samus will climb up the inside of the wall. If done in excess and in specific areas, this odd functionality would bring the player into previously undocumented sectors of Zebes. This odd phenomena fermented into what we now call Metroid's "secret worlds," which remained a mystery for several years.

No one could have guess the truth. The demystifying of the secret worlds by Kent Hansen in 1998 is one of the NES's most fascinating stories (you have heard of all this before, right?). Hansen discovered that Metroid's careful orchestration of confusing corridors was not Real. What we saw in Zebes was Imaginary---it reflected a world that we couldn't touch, a table of discrete rooms that lead no where and are accessed by nothing, pointed to and addressed internally to create a seemingly complete map. Secret worlds were revealing the cracks in Imaginary Zebes, like shards of a broken mirror reflecting what we mistakingly took for a painting.

The "wall glitch," as it is now known, shows us hints of what is Real in Zebes, creating valid map data in invalid locations. We dismiss it as gibberish. Hansen ends his explanation of Metroid's mapping techniques noting that he "has probably crushed the hopeful dreams of quite a few avid Metroid gamers." The secret worlds have been popularly regarded as curiosities, symbolic of an enigmatic game that intentionally tries to misdirect players in the steps of a sexually obfuscated protagonist.

A glitch is in itself a curious thing. We find Mother Brain, climb triumphantly out of the ground, stomp out onto the surface, and stand aghast as a woman peels out of our orange and red suit. No one expects this (unless it's 2011 and you haven't been living under a rock), so we call it a plot twist. When we get stuck in a door, however, and rise into a room with an inanimate image of Mother Brian (though she is still very Real), we call the unexpected event a glitch. Yet in both cases, the game was simply acting within its defined parameters.

The difference in these two outcomes is that the one is conceivable within the Imaginary Zebes while the other is not. We can make sense of the male Samus becoming female because it is conceivable within our definition of gender and sense (i.e. she is either one of the other). The secret worlds are the equivalent of Samus taking off her helmet and revealing that she is a third sex, or perhaps multiple sexes. It rips the carefully crafted world its seams and shows us the wizard behind the curtain.

Many fault a glitch for breaking a game's spell, as though there is some sort of magic involved. If there is any magic in gaming, it is in a skilled programmer's ability to take the creative seeds of mushroomed trees and blossoming pipes and translate that vision into something understood by a machine on our living room floor. It always operates correctly, but not always in a way we expect, sometimes generating an error in ourselves.

The Real language of a game has capacities far beyond our expectations. Metroid's secret worlds contain no items for us (if they did, we would not call them glitches), and will inevitably kill you if you venture too far into their depths. Yet they are procedurally beautiful in so many ways. The lack of human design in their layout creates worlds where nothing need be logical. Mother Brain sits lifeless at the end of a long tube. Small platforms dot a room of lukewarm lava. Doors open seemingly without an exit, inviting you to enter and sending you somewhere beyond space and time. This is a very odd place indeed.

Many no doubt were disappointed by secret worlds and by Metroid in general---after all, the secret worlds are just another perspective, its own perspective, to a game we thought we knew. I am not one of those disappointed players. To think that 70% of this game, so familiar to so many players, occupies exactly 0 bytes of data. The glimpses I see of Real Zebes break a spell indeed---the spell that the player is exploring a world of purpose, wrought by some divine hand on the other side of the Pacific. It is one thing to understand how a game works, but it is another entirely to see how it work.

Everything from the first screen to the moment when Samus rips off her helmet and bares her flowing hair for the world is teeming with mystery, and not simply because its music is so haunting or because the path to Kraid so convoluted, nor because you can jump up walls and into places outside the Imaginary, but because the underlying software is mysterious by design. Zebes is organic and untamed, re-created every time we press that little power button. Zebes is alive.

Community review by dagoss (December 09, 2011) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.