Super Metroid was released in Japan on March 19, 1994 and is one of my favorite games of all time. The following is probably the most Boomer-sounding nonsense, but the 90s were a wild time to be a kid and nothing like it has really happened before or since. Let me try and paint a picture for those of you who either weren't there or cannot remember. In April of 1994 (Super Metroid was released in American in April) I was 10 years old. I owned a SNES and my weekend free-time was devoted to gaming. My allowance was $3 per week, and renting a SNES game cost $1 per night, so I could rent a game Friday night, and exchange or extend it Saturday night and return it Sunday evening. You were not guaranteed to get to rent the game you wanted, though. These were physical cartridges and supplies would run out for your local video store sometimes. Additionally, you were sharing these games with everyone who rented it, making playing games like Final Fantasy III nigh impossible - someone would have rented it during the week and deleted your save. Whether it was market pressure or it was that game developers from the previous generation were experienced in making arcade games, what you often ended up with were games like Streets of Rage or Final Fight which focused on you sitting down for a gaming session without save files. These games were built to eat quarters in the arcade, but translated well to the game rental scene - you would hammer through the game one night and return it the next day.

The first video game I ever bought was Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan). I rented it first, fell in love with the story, and had my heart crushed the following week when someone had deleted my save. When I rented Super Metroid that very same month, I knew that I had to buy it as well. Super Metroid opens with an unbearably long cutscene, a forced boss loss, and an escape sequence before landing you on planet Zebes and giving you free reign to explore and power up. The concept is so simple to me as an adult, but I vividly remember the sense of excitement in exploring the unknown world. I remember getting stuck early on because I could not beat Bomb Chozo - the game's first mini-boss. I was a kid and pretty bad at taking learning from mistakes and observations, so I would just enter the room and spam my missiles (missing many of them) and usually die to the boss. However, I did eventually beat Bomb Chozo (it's a fairly trivial boss), and this culminated in me having all the tools I needed to explore the world - Morphball, Bomb, and Missiles.

For reasons I do not recall, we had 2 SNES controllers called an "ascii pad. Those switches allowed for a per-button state of normal, "turbo" (which would input the button-press very quickly... I could not find the exact hertz of mashing, but it was fast), and "auto" which would just simulate both "turbo" and holding down that button. Now, one thing I learned very quickly was that if I had turbo mode enabled for the 'shoot' button, then I could do an infinite bomb-jump. Looking back and having played the game as an adult with an understanding of the requirements to perform this is insane - it is essentially a 3-frame trick to do it once, and you need perfect timing to chain the trick enough to gain height. I still play Super Metroid randomizers and have difficulty getting the timing right for this trick, and the fact that turbo mode simply mashed at the perfect rate to accomplish it is amazing. However, this allowed me to sequence-break to areas that the developers probably did not intend? At the ship, you can pilot Samus up a wall just to the right and you could make it to the top and over to face your first intended obstacle: a green door. You needed Super Missiles to open green doors, but the game has not told you this yet, and you have not gone down the intended path to finding super missiles yet. However, if you can easily IBJ (infinite bomb-jump), you could go higher and find yet another door - this time orange (Power Bombs).

See, this is all part and partial to Metroidvanias - you are teased with areas/items you just have not yet unlocked. Super Metroid was amazing at this because the ship was your hub before you knew anything else, and would return there often to save your progress. However, it also had these "go and explore, then come back" teasers to nudge the player along. So, I went exploring and eventually made my way to Red Brinstar - the first crossroads in the game. You go from Green Brinstar through a long sequence of hallways, eventually opening a gate, and making your way through a door to find yourself in Red Brinstar. You can see there are two paths: up, which you just can't quite jump to, and down, which is the intended route. In fact, you cannot even turn around and go back, so you are technically locked into going down to get the high-jump boots and later return here with Ice Beam to progress up. However, I had free IBJ, so I went up first. It's a tricky corridor because you have to kill these flying things that are invincible to your normal missiles, but can be killed with Supers. We only have a couple to spend at the moment, so we kill most of them, then IBJ our way up to a breakable floor/ceiling at the top (and again... the turbo timing was so amazing that it would leave a bomb at just the right height to leave the next bomb able to blow up the ceiling and allow you to keep climbing... amazing). Some more exploring and then I did my first ever sequence break: I got Power Bombs before High Jump Boots and Ice Beam.

Later that month, my brother and me completely enamored with the game, we were in a toy store (EB Toys, if memory serves, though it probably doesn't), and my brother bought the official guide to Super Metroid so we could beat it 100%. I was astonished to see that the intended path differed from where I went, and I understood why, but it made me feel a sense of pride doing it in an unintended way. To this day, I still try and play games by my own rules. I have been playing a ton of Eldin Ring since its release, and I adore runs where I get to try skips like Godskin Noble Skip. Super Metroid lit that in me at a very young age and I still love it to this day.

Anyway, Happy Anniversary to one of the all-time greats! I think it is definitely worth a play-through if you have never played this classic, or even a replay if you have and it has been a while.

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