Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has one of the best title screens ever.
It starts off with edge-lit glimpses and silhouettes, a bit like a Bond intro. But instead of naked bodies and wait-was-that-a-nipple, there’s something grotesque and alien and impressively FMV in the darkness.
There’s those classic Prime-y choir synths, which might be the mournful sounds of an ancient civilisation, or just a planet’s history given voice.
And the text comes with such awesome panning and scanning and general UI maximalism, with this honeycombed screen texture and skittering letters flicking on and off — some of the letters from Retro Studios Game become Metroid — and noises that are part hacking, part insectoid trills, with a heartbeat sound underneath.
The choir goes one note higher for the fourth note, there are two more lub-dub pulses before a crucial beat of silence, and then that drop of the main theme, clear and bright – a signal from space. Then the best bit! That weird shimmer-shudder sound as the Metroid Prime 2 title enters the screen. You can feel it in your ASMR gland.
And don’t get me started on the sense of epic heroism from raising the last two notes of the phrase when the melody gets repeated.
So much of the Prime series’ appeal is here. The mood, the music, the mechanical scanning and interfacing with worlds historic and natural, and you’ve not even pressed Start! (You should press Start.)
But maybe you like the original Prime one more; the eerie crackle and fade-in of Nintendo and Retro Studios presents, the Lucozade orange that might be a Metroid’s innards, the spooky version of the main theme.
The 2023 remaster ‘fixes’ the short animation cycle so that the tendril sways up and down but it looks a bit silly. That abrupt VHS loop in the original had the sinister feel of found footage, like the scene of a crime.
But the title screen was more than just a flashy entry point, a nice hallway to the house (read: deadly planet). It set the tone, framed the game. And in my memory, it’s now part of the game’s texture and movement: When you press Start, it does that little swing into a different part of the Metroid (with more bioelectric fizzing), and then after choosing your save, there’s that swooping guided tour and slow fade-out.
This sequence of that spacey intro theme followed by the more upbeat choral blare of the file select, before Samus emerges to that iconic five-note fanfare, is a cadence as inseparably linked in my mind as the track sequence on an album. After In The End comes A Place For My Head.
Heck, I’ve not even played Prime 3 and yet I somehow ‘remember’ the title screen, probably just from some YouTube archaeology. But it still stuck because it rocks, with that tragic, vaguely female siren synth and an ink blot of infestation across text that’s gelled together like cells.
Recognisably Prime, with that meld of the organic and the technological, and you can forgive that too-long fade-to-black and the goofy font of ‘Corruption’ because in the second bit of the tune there’s that desperate high note wail as the Terminator drums kick in.
So good. Who even needs to play the game?! (I do, Nintendo – please release those remasters.)
But then again, maybe you prefer the 2D Metroid title screens, and I can respect that.
You might like the cinematic Super Metroid, with its alarm shrill escalation before that full-screen reveal of bodies deathly still beside a moving (but still caged?) Metroid at the centre, the thick bass coming in waves like a planet’s pulse.
Or the stars and surface of OG Metroid and Zero Mission, beginning with the crust of the world before the adventure beneath. Or the impressively creepy off-key dissonance of the Metroid 2 one, that progresses to a tune that includes the low health alarm as a sample/anxiety trigger. Wild!
Or maybe you prefer the straighter Metroid font used in the Mercury Steam games, without the skew that gives it that Star Wars-intro sense of vastness and adventure. (Why would you prefer this?)
Some people are apprehensive about Prime 4 because of a motorbike in a PS2 desert, which is fair, I guess. I think it looks rad personally, and am excited for the prospect of more Prime. More of that slow-grow of knowledge and abilities, the weighty feeling of squelch and scrunch as you traipse through gorgeous biomes, the organic curve of alien architecture.
But also the pleasure of engaging with something so gorgeous and evocative that I might still think about its title screen 20 years later.
