"I see myself, within Nintendo, as sort of an outsider," says Kensuke Tanabe.
The veteran Nintendo game producer doesn't mean that he's ostracized by his fellow game creators, but that the projects he heads up can be a little weird, even by Nintendo's standards. Tanabe largely works with development teams outside Japan, heading up the production of series like Donkey Kong Country and Metroid Prime.
It was that latter series that had fans riled up at E3 Expo, and not all in a good way. The last game in the Metroid Prime series came out in 2007, and fans were sure this was the year that Nintendo would finally continue the first-person space-adventure series for Wii U. What Nintendo announced instead was Metroid Prime: Federation Force, a multiplayer game for the portable 3DS to be released next year. The fan response? A petition, currently with 20,000 signatures, to cancel the game.
Sure, the realization that Nintendo did not have a Wii U Metroid waiting in the wings is a pretty huge letdown. But why take it out on Federation Force? From talking with Tanabe at E3, one thing is clear above all else: This is a man who is passionate about Metroid Prime.
"I was trained to look at [Metroid] from a different perspective," Tanabe said. "I'd never seen anything that focused on the Galactic Federation against the Space Pirates. I thought that would be an interesting idea to explore." Most other Metroid games saw the player in the role of loner bounty hunter Samus Aran, with the wider world of the series as background dressing. With Federation Force, Tanabe wants to go into details on all that backstory.
In retrospect, Nintendo didn't do itself any favors with the way it unveiled Federation Force at E3. It took a part of the game called "Blast Ball," in which two teams of players try to shoot a giant ball into a goal (soccer with guns, basically), and presented it as one of the competitive rounds at its "Nintendo World Championships" event on the Sunday prior to E3. Days later, it revealed that "Blast Ball" was actually part of Federation Force, meaning that the World Championships competitors had been playing a new Metroid without knowing it.
Cute. But it also left everyone with the impression that the new Metroid was a competitive e-sports title. This isn't the case, Tanabe says. It's a four-player cooperative adventure that you could also play in single-player mode. It's not just about playing matches of Blast Ball for victory on the space pitch.
