XCOM-like ‘Metroid Tactics’ was reportedly pitched inside Retro Studios

A Metroid Tactics game was pitched by some of the developers of Metroid Prime for Nintendo Wii.

That’s according to a new video from Did You Know Gaming, which claims that a leading member of the Metroid Prime team pitched the game, which was styled after the XCOM series, to higher-ups at Retro, following the conclusion of the Metroid Prime series.

Paul Tozour, who worked on Metroid Prime, told Did You Know Gaming that the game, which was planned for the Nintendo Wii, was conceived in late 2007 following the end of Metroid Prime 3’s development.

The game would have been a prequel to the series, and according to the pitch document would have taken place “long before all other games in the Metroid series.”

The pitch reportedly goes on to say it would cover “the moment when Samus Aran first separates from the Chozo who raised her from childhood, encounters humanity and becomes a bounty hunter.”

“It was basically XCOM… it was XCOM in the Metroid universe,” Tozour told Did You Know Gaming.

An extended description of the proposed game from the pitch document reads:

“Metroid Tactics allows the player to control the legendary Samus Aran, a squad of elite Galactic Federation troopers, and various other bounty hunters as they work together to defeat the Space Pirates.

“Along the way, the player can hire new units and upgrade all of the units in his team with many different kinds of new armor, weapons, skills, and abilities – with Samus and the various bounty hunters having a large number of unique abilities that will prove invaluable in combat.”

However, the game was never greenlit by the senior members of Retro’s team, and was never presented to Nintendo.

According to Tozour, “If there was a way to pitch something from inside Retro Studios that would make it all the way up the chain to Nintendo and actually get approved for production, then I never figured out what it was, and no one else at Retro did either.

”In order to succeed, a pitch would have had to enlist the support of then-design lead Mark Pacini, studio head Michael Kelbaugh, and Nintendo producer Kensuke Tanabe, and those three individuals had wildly different tastes and perspectives on gameplay and different goals for what they wanted to see Retro Studios working on.”