The original Metroid Prime live-action trailer, which debuted twenty years ago, has been upgraded to 4K resolution.
It might not give us more information about Metroid Prime 4, but it’s an interesting piece of gaming history. The trailer is an odd mix of live and in-game footage, which oscillates between an actor dressed in the classic Samus power suit and the video game’s first-person perspective. It follows the actor as he navigates the halls of Tallon IV and replicates many of the game’s features and mechanics.
Samus is shown firing her cannon arm at CGI creatures, transforming into a morph ball and, of course, making her way through several doors. The trailer ends with Samus encountering Parasite Queen, the game’s first big boss.
The clip originally played in cinemas and on TV stations before the release of Metroid Prime in 2002. Although it eventually made its way onto the internet, downloads were generally poor quality and low resolution.
However, Metroid fans on Nintendo’s subreddit recently unearthed a 4K version of the trailer uploaded by YouTuber Denis-Carl Robidoux. The ultra-high definition video is said to have been created by scanning the original 35mm film of the trailer, provided to Robidoux by a contributor.
Watch the trailer below in all its high definition glory:
The perfect trailer?
There’s no shortage of excellent video game trailers, but few have been able to capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of the games they feature as brilliantly as this one. Everything from Samus’ costume to the sets she traverses evokes the decaying industrialization of Metroid Prime.
As some editors have pointed out, the trailer is stylistically similar to the live-action Doom trailer that was released in 2016. Both reimagine a beloved, heavily armored video game character as the hero of live action, and recreate many of the games core features and mechanics through physical settings.
But those aren’t the only live-action video game trailers that have been released. Insomniac’s Resistance 3 was revealed through a spooky live teaser, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided explored its augmented reality with cast, and Bethesda released a live trailer for Skyrim ahead of launch. Few, however, have been released in such high resolution as this Metroid Prime trailer.