So I set an alarm. On a Tuesday. For a video game announcement. I am 100% aware of how that sounds, and I don't care, because Nintendo's E3 Direct hit at 9am Pacific this morning and inside the first fifteen minutes they confirmed something I genuinely thought was a decade-old rumor that would never, ever happen: Metroid Dread is real. It's coming October 8th. I actually said "no way" out loud in my kitchen and my coffee went cold while I sat there rewatching the trailer three times.
Quick context for anyone who doesn't follow this stuff (my mom, mostly, since she reads this blog and has no idea what a Metroid is). Back around 2005 there were rumors of a DS game called Metroid Dread that got shown behind closed doors and then just vanished. For years it was the "Half-Life 3" of handheld Nintendo games — people brought it up as a joke, a thing that was obviously dead and that only weirdos on forums still talked about. I was one of the weirdos. And now, sixteen years later, it's a real game, made by MercurySteam (the studio that did the Samus Returns remake on 3DS, which honestly ruled), and it's the first brand new 2D Metroid since Fusion came out in 2002. Nineteen years. I was in middle school.
The trailer itself is genuinely unsettling in a good way — there's a sequence with some kind of robotic enemy that straight up hunts Samus down a corridor and it gave me an actual physical reaction, shoulders up around my ears, the whole thing. That's what a "Dread" game is supposed to feel like I guess. I'll take it.
The other big swing today was the Breath of the Wild sequel, and here's my honest, slightly annoyed opinion: I'm tired of teasers. This is the third time now we've gotten a moody trailer with no title and no release window, just Link's arm doing something glowy and weird and some floating chunks of rock above Hyrule Castle. It looks cool! I'm not saying it doesn't look cool. But we first saw this game at E3 2019. Two years of "soon" is a lot of soon. At some point I want a date, or at minimum a real name, instead of atmosphere.
Worth saying too that this whole E3 was fully digital again, no show floor, no line for the Nintendo booth, no random guy in a Chocobo costume handing out flyers. Understandable given everything going on with COVID still, obviously, and honestly the Direct format works better for Nintendo specifically than it ever did for the chaotic live-stage stuff other publishers do. But I do miss the messiness of it a little. Monday's Xbox and Bethesda showcase had actual gameplay for Halo Infinite finally, which looked way better than the version they showed off last year that got roasted into oblivion (RIP Craig, we hardly knew ye), and that one at least had some stage energy to it even streamed.
Anyway. I've got about four browser tabs open right now comparing frame-by-frame screenshots of the Metroid Dread trailer with people on Reddit trying to figure out if that's an E.M.M.I. robot or something new, and I have actual work I'm supposed to be doing today. Half tempted to just take the afternoon off and reread the old Metroid Prime forum threads from 2015 where everyone insisted Dread was fake and dead and never coming back. Somebody owes those forum mods an apology, honestly, because I remember arguing about this exact thing on a message board that probably doesn't even exist anymore.
One more small thing before I close the laptop: no Metroid Prime 4 news at all today, not even a "still alive" screenshot, and that's the game I've actually been waiting years for. Dread being real is a genuinely wild surprise and I'm thrilled about it, but Prime 4 has been in some kind of limbo since Nintendo scrapped the original version and handed it to Retro Studios to start over back in 2019. Two years of silence on that one now. I'll believe it exists when I see thirty seconds of actual footage and not a second before.
October's going to be a good month for old Nintendo weirdos like me, apparently. Going back to bed for twenty minutes before the day actually starts.