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Original Metroid Prime devs criticise remaster for omitting credits
diffusionx
Gold Member
Why is it proper? The point of credits is to, ahem, credit people who worked on a game. It is just a flat out fact to say that pretty much nobody who worked on Metroid Prime in 2002 worked on the Metroid Prime remaster in 2023. They didn’t touch it. Why should they get a credit on a game they did not do? If anything it takes away from the people who worked on the remaster. Note they all have a credit, for the game they did work on, Metroid Prime in 2002.It's completely weird, especially given that nothing has to be taken away or sacrificed in order to include credit.
It's simply doing the obviously proper thing, with absolutely no further expense or obligation whatsoever.
And people are like "why do it?"
I just don’t understand why this attention whore Zoid Kirsch thinks he should get a slot in credits for a release made by a company he doesn’t work for anymore, and a release he had absolutely nothing to do with.
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Even sillier is that probably most or all(?) of the creative work isn't even owned by the worker. It's owned by the company. Ya, they can reference to future employers what they did, but it's technically not even their property.
So unless there's some laws or agreements in place that mandates credits (like some Screen Actors Guild kind of agreements), it doesn't even sound like employees have a right to their name in the credits at all. So it's up to the media company to make the credits list as big or small as they want.
Just to show how wishy washy the process is, some studios do it one way with 20 minutes of credits, some have a fraction of the size. Some might credit the original employee of the franchise 20 years ago, some dont etc...
BlackTron
Member
The original staff of Metroid Prime is responsible for the very existence of the game. Prime Remastered would not exist without their work.
There's an aspect to this that seems fundamentally lost to many of you -let's try again. Imagine an OOT remake where all of Koji Kondo's god-tier music compositions were upgraded from MIDI to modern sound standards.
But, because Koji Kondo didn't do any of the work, he isn't credited in the game. Yes, all those wonderful ocarina songs are not attributed to Koji Kondo, just the new sound designer/engineer. Because Koji Kondo only worked on OOT in 1998 and not now. Even though he wrote the fucking music. It's still his. All they did was update it.
You are asking "why is this proper" over the entire content of a game. Completely ludicrous.
diffusionx
Gold Member
Yes, and they got credited for bringing Metroid Prime into existence, in 2002. They had absolutely nothing to do with the making of this remaster. They got a broad credit as the original team for bringing the game into existence which seems appropriate to me. I don’t see why they think they should get a credit (that they can then bring forward to other potential employers) when they had literally and absolutely nothing to do with getting this remaster. The people who made the remaster should get the credit.
Kondo is credited as a composer in the 2011 OOT remake so I dont know what you are on about.
lame gag1990
Member
When you are using someone else's material, the least you can do is credit where credit is due.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Media people are entitled. They need their name on it for boosting their ego.
Almost everything in life you see around you from an Ikea print to a fire hydrant to a slick looking toaster to a board game were designed by someone (or a team). And over time, any creation has gotten revisions where the core thing is going to be intact. And I dont want to hear any shit from creative types thinking "Well, our art is more harder to do than designing an air fryer or building a house so we deserve our name listed and you guys dont".
You dont see credits, ego mania, or demands from other workers. We all just go to work, do our job, get paid and go home. Whose the design team that makes all the slick looking BMWs? How the hell do I know. Nobody knows. The building's worth of workers arent listed in the drivers manual nor scroll line by line on the touch screen.
And I've never seen one BMW worker demand their name listed anywhere.
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BlackTron
Member
Yes he was, appropriately so. According to you, it would be perfectly fine if he wasn't. I clearly proposed it as an imaginary hypothetical situation that would have been shameful.
Edit: your language "the people who made the remaster" is telling. This is not a new game inspired by an old one. It's an old game made by people in 2002 that was simply ported to Switch by different people.
However I agree with you it's silly how he came out on Twitter in record time to complain. Nintendo/Retro is also under no legal obligation to credit anyone (they own everything). Neither of these are really the point.
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semiconscious
Member
why is this happening? still pissed that from software gets no mention on the demon's souls remake box...
you mean, other than providing the basis for it? i mean, hell, there is no friggin' remaster without their work! therefore, i'd say that their contribution is completely & totally essential!...
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Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I mean, the original Prime only lists Miyamoto as producer which we know often doesn't mean they were very hands-on yet know Prime wouldn't even be in first person without him.They didn't even credit Tommy Tallarico, who practically worked on it hand in hand with Shigeru Miyamoto for five years!
And the original Prime lists the IP creator Sakamoto in the Special Thanks only, lol. Also Gunpei Yokoi is named too but none of the other co-creators and it's probably the same for many other original Metroid series character/creature/world/lore designers they took from.
Tallarico was also uncredited in the original Prime and all the trilogy as well. So maybe if they had added all the proper credits back then they'd have more of a case to whine about not being included yet still being referred to now.
The old Retro members aren't omitted from the credits in the remaster, people are just told where to find the detailed credits, ie, in the original game or whatever online resources that list the original game's credits.
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BlackTron
Member
It's convention for credits to roll at the end of a movie or game, or to see the authors name on a book.
Further, because it's media, it doesn't require any extra effort. They could have copy and pasted it in. Unlike a fire hydrant. In practical terms.
Realistically who bothers watching all the credits anyway, unless it's Smash lol. Again, not the point. It's simple respect and doesn't cost anything. I'm not saying every coffee pusher or person who contributed one line of code needs to be there but frankly if I were in charge I'd just copy/paste the whole thing for good measure. Because as soon as I have to think about who to include, or not include, it's not worth the time at all.
Kagoshima_Luke
Gold Member
Unfortunately, it's a limitation of the Nintendo Switch cart. Not enough space for another set of credits.
BlackTron
Member
Please understand.
CamHostage
Member
Perhaps, but in a field where credits do exist, no good is done by providing deficient credits. There are people out there who are interested in seeing production names on a product for whatever reason there is. (Some of it is personal, some of it is professional, in a larger sense there's now benefit to it in education/history and to metadata databasing, albeit the original credits on a remaster complicate that dataset,) In art & entertainment fields, unlike other fields for better or worse, this has for decades been a part of the product package.
It matters to who it matters to.
Text in a table is about as cheap and easy as data gets, and there's no technical reason why every name involved who qualify for crediting couldn't be included in a text crawl. (Make it an optional additional feature if your credits list is specifically timed out to the music or for an ending sting, something like that is incredibly easy to add elsewhere.) Nintendo obviously wasn't required to list every name who ever had a hand in on Metroid Prime 1, but it's an intentional and easily avoidable omission that could have been handled without incident.
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ResilientBanana
Member
But the new door does look like shit. Don't justify poor design choices.
CamHostage
Member
I don't think so, you rarely get royalties for work under standard employment contract for a company unless specifically included in your terms. The video game market I don't believe has many of those types of ownership participation systems in place, and as an employee you might benefit from the company's success in terms of stock options or bonus pay or renegotiation of salary, but even creative heads would have to be special to get a cut of a big commercial success, much less down-the-line coders and designers.
Still, there may be other legalities involved, including what WFTTAD said about requiring new permissions to put the names of people no longer employed by the company into the new credits.
In a digital era, the idea of the vitality of an accurate document of record is questionable: if the names of the original Metroid Prime crew is in the original game code and written down in MobyGames or other databases, does it need to be written down again to be etched into history?
However, this will be the future of Metroid Prime 1 going forward. Every future release of the game will pretty much be this or a variant of this. And when somebody's kids go to boot up Metroid Prime to show that their dad or grandpa or whoever close to them worked on this classic, that name won't be there anymore. College students interested in deep-dives of game design history (there are people who recognize important level designers or battle system programmers, same as how there are noted character designers in animation or great cinematographers in film or elite sound engineers in music) will have to self-select this physical product out of their research since it is incomplete. (Not that most thesis papers are written by students reading through the end credits of actual films instead of just looking stuff up quickly on IMDB, but it's a weird idea that the thing is no longer a valid source of evidence for itself.) And then when you get into ports and name-only ports and remasters and reimaginings and other modified versions of works specific to video games (do the original Sonic Team members even want to be listed on that awful Sonic 1 GBA port?), it gets real complicated who does and does not get listed on a product, but usually studios do try to make people involved satisfied with crediting.
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Tell’em Keb
Member
People should get credit for their work. How that credit is given is unfortunately not up to them sometimes. They should take it up with the devs and we should all move along.
BlackTron
Member
This is really the most valuable addition to the discussion and goes places I was thinking about, but getting worried would be laughed off around here. It's a piece of creative art and the people who made it should be in the credits for posterity's sake if nothing else. Such a convention should be standard practice and to challenge it as "why bother?" is extremely troubling.
People are quick to point out that you can still say you worked on the original game, put it on your resume, or anybody interested enough can just look it up on Wikipedia. But this is placing dependency on an outside source of information to retain the validity and even existence of said information. Imagine finding a 100 year old book that you can't find the author to because back then, for some reason people managed to come up with, they didn't think it was important. You might make the case that who cares about what happens in 100 years so why bother? Because the notion is that giving credit and securing posterity is meaningless, and as a society we should be better than that. It also makes information easier to manipulate by bad actors, and we are moving into an age of information warfare.
While Miyamoto, Kondo, Takeda et al will appear in every Mario Bros 3 ROM for all time, the people who actually made Prime 1 just had their names erased from history and replaced by people who polished up their work. 2D games don't need updates the same way 3D games do, so Mario 3 is still fine but the new Prime just became the new de facto reference version of the game. What happened here is the same as if Mario 3 GBA totally replaced NES as the known/reference version going forward, and the original team's names were completely wiped from the title. From both a historical standpoint and simple respect, I think that would suck.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Really comes down to how much someone values seeing credits for a piece of work.
Aside from creative media types of work, no other kind of company or industry cares. The worker doesn't care about seeing their name attached to tasks and projects they did, and neither do hiring managers wanting proof their name is attached to something in order to be believed.
If I put on my resume I helped get up and running a data system years ago that took 3 years until it was launched internally, I put that on my resume and tell the person on the other side of the desk what I did. I need zero proof I actually did it. I just explain what I did clearly. But sometimes people do bring in some example work or PPT presentations they did to show they know what they are doing. It doesn't have their name on it. So technically it might be someone else's PPT. But it doesn't matter. Every other industry seems to trust a candidate if they have a good resume and can answer questions while not sounding like a bullshitter.
For creative types who have that view (I've seen it here on GAF too) where proof of being part of a project is needed to be believed or else the hiring manager doesn't believe you then I guess thats the nature of the industry. Nobody believes anybody unless their name is attached to something. So even if someone brought in artwork they did, but it's not publicly acknowledged in credits it's their piece still nobody believes you. I dont know how widespread that tactic is across the media world, but if that's how it then so be it.
is this not the same thing????????????????????????????????
BlackTron
Member
I find this mentality bizarre. The original team did not work on the remastering process but their work IS included in the final product. In fact, most of the work, even the work present in the remaster, is that of the original team.
I don't want to go on forever so here's my last example. Metroid Prime Remastered has a lot of music in it, right? Well, who composed it? You wouldn't know by looking at the credits. In my opinion, if you write the music for a game, you should be credited as a composer, not placated with a participation trophy. I'm using music because it's very easy for everyone to understand, even though the significance carries through the rest of the game.
rabbity-thing
Member
I feel like it's time for you to have an "Are we the baddies" moment.
Reizo Ryuu
Member
It's not, credits are entirely self-congratulatory.
Trunx81
Gold Member
I’m amazed that this is even discussed.
TLZ
Banned
Even if remake you should mention because it's still based on the original and you haven't created anything from scratch.
Green_Eyes
Member
Doesn't surprise me because Nintendo are absolute, utter scumbags.
justiceiro
Marlboro: Other M
Really petty from Nintendo.
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
How about you don't jump on stupid bandwagons because you can't think for yourself and want the attention instead? Not only do you jump on them but also amp them up to 11, lol.
Either way, what you call excuses is logical reasoning vs going on flippant rants attempting to insult digital objects and whoever doesn't find them offensive aesthetically.
Metroid Prime series doors prior to Remaster, I guess they all were "shit" after the first and likely most experimental and least refined in terms of style.
Oh no wait it surely must have some kind of meaning behind it, I guess the shields in Tallon IV were lower powered with the planet abandoned for so long, if the events transpired a little later they'd be altogether disabled.
Not. And yes, this dude's in the credits of all three games, with the same position in 1 and 2 at that.
And yes, absolutely zero of you wannabe art connoisseurs who now know better than Retro's current art directors, designers and asset creators noticed anything before his misleading shitpost implying it's the same asset done wrong when it's an all new effect done exactly, and expertly, as intended.
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ResilientBanana
Member
But it does indeed, look like shit.How about you don't jump on stupid bandwagons because you can't think for yourself and want the attention instead? Not only do you jump on them but also amp them up to 11, lol.
Either way, what you call excuses is logical reasoning vs going on flippant rants attempting to insult digital objects and whoever doesn't find them offensive aesthetically.
Metroid Prime series doors prior to Remaster, I guess they all were "shit" after the first and likely most experimental and least refined in terms of style.
Oh no wait it surely must have some kind of meaning behind it, I guess the shields in Tallon IV were lower powered with the planet abandoned for so long, if the events transpired a little later they'd be altogether disabled.
MrTroubleMaker
Member
Wow that's awful. They did the work, they should be given the credits.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
Being real, the most likely reason for the lack of specific credits is that they weren't supplied to those doing the remaster for inclusion. There's no reason not to simply paste in (literally just) a bunch of text, it's not like anyone on the remaster team are going to want to receive credit for the original and not the update/port process.
Basically its monumentally unlikely to be the result of malice, most likely a weird publishing oversight.
Basically its monumentally unlikely to be the result of malice, most likely a weird publishing oversight.
Tams
Member
Bridges
Member
I'm kind of shocked to see that this is controversial. Are you guys telling me that a remastered David Bowie album shouldn't be credited to David Bowie since he technically wasn't there to work on the remastered version?
The material was created by other people, to act like that is worthy of dismissing because a new group came and touched it up is actually insane.
I rarely pay attention to credits in all honesty but I feel for the devs here. This is stupid.
The material was created by other people, to act like that is worthy of dismissing because a new group came and touched it up is actually insane.
I rarely pay attention to credits in all honesty but I feel for the devs here. This is stupid.
01011001
Banned
I mean they should, because similarly to this game, their remasters also use a ton of the original code. they usually let their engine run on top of the original engine, just like Saber Interactive made the Halo Anniversary games, where their own in-house Saber 3D Engine is used as a layer that runs simultaneously to the original game code of the BLAM engine.
01011001
Banned
imagine book translations! in those literally every word that isn't a name is replaced by a different word and even different grammar,
imaging if Stephen King's name was taken off of his books because he didn't write the French or German version of that book lol.
CamHostage
Member
One could argue about whether credits are valuable or vanity, but the reality is that credits do exist in creative media types of work, and the people in that business care.
It's generally part of why they became part of this industry, learning complicated skills and facing a competitive market for a relatively small slice of the profits. (True, no industry truly pays its bulk workforce the value of what they produce, but this is how these markets work.) It's an intangible perk of the job.
Back in the old days of the film industry, credits were only for marquee names; it was promotion for the product about to be consumed and advertising for the studio who employed said talent in their vertical studio system. At some point, those credits themselves started to amass a value, and when movies like Star Wars came along and employed hundreds of people for the technical work of special effects and craftwork, film producers offered a credit in their new full-size ending credit sequences (credits used to run in the beginning of a film, usually for less than a minute of screentime) in part to help satiate salary or other demands from this highly-unionized workforce.
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/09/when-did-movie-credits-get-so-long/
Gaming doesn't have the same history, but it takes a lot of lessons from the film industry in a market that rose too fast to make up most of its own rules.
They say there ain't no business like show business for a reason. Not a lot of guys come into an office saying they should be hired because they helped build the Empire State Building or whatnot, but the entertainment bizzes attract a lot of kooky and colorful characters. Credits are among other things an old, physical way of dealing with that fringe element. (One could say that a lot of things are obsolete in the digital era, including the need to print every staffer's name on celluloid or on a paper sleeve or in the code of an entertainment product, but then again, lots of things disappear in the digital era too if they're not written down on paper...)
You worked at Guerilla Games as a janitor,and got asked to quit after a few days because the place kept getting dirtier and dirtier upon your employment there,ofcourse you shouldn't expect to be credited,you worked in the cleaning department
systemr123
Banned
Almost like that
. No I worked there as QA engineer but because some lies from the intermediary that offered me there the deal didn’t work out. If you must know, I was offered a 40 hour work week by the intermediary, but from Guerilla I got offered a waiver where I had to resign my Dutch rights of employment and they offered a 0 hour contract. As you can imagine if you’re a EU citizen that stuff just doesn’t fly so I said no thank you when I got the contract offer and that was that.
BlackTron
Member
How about you don't jump on stupid bandwagons because you can't think for yourself and want the attention instead? Not only do you jump on them but also amp them up to 11, lol.
Either way, what you call excuses is logical reasoning vs going on flippant rants attempting to insult digital objects and whoever doesn't find them offensive aesthetically.
Metroid Prime series doors prior to Remaster, I guess they all were "shit" after the first and likely most experimental and least refined in terms of style.
Oh no wait it surely must have some kind of meaning behind it, I guess the shields in Tallon IV were lower powered with the planet abandoned for so long, if the events transpired a little later they'd be altogether disabled.
Not. And yes, this dude's in the credits of all three games, with the same position in 1 and 2 at that.
And yes, absolutely zero of you wannabe art connoisseurs who now know better than Retro's current art directors, designers and asset creators noticed anything before his misleading shitpost implying it's the same asset done wrong when it's an all new effect done exactly, and expertly, as intended.
I had no idea what the door debate was, where it came from, or what my opinion on it was until this posts explanation and screenshots.
Art is subjective, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Mine WAS that the old Prime 1 door is better/cooler looking than that of it's sequels in this post, but it's a pedantic nitpick.
But then I went and actually sought out Zoid Kirsch's tweet and saw the actual comparison. I think that by implying it was just a mistake with the transparency level he was just being diplomatic. It would be bad to imply they had made such a change on purpose. It doesn't even look nearly as good as the Prime sequel doors above. It just went from looking like cool hardware to no detail whatsoever.
Calling anyone who has an opinion on this some sort of armchair art director really casts light on your own insecurities over the reputation of a game. Don't worry it's not a personal attack on you if we have an opinion on the way a door or the credits were handled in your favorite Nintendo game. In fact if you think the new door looks better I can respect that opinion without resorting to damaging your character, even though it gets pretty suspicious that you don't really have one of your own and you count on outside sources to tell you what's good (such as whatever the current Retro staff tell you to like).
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Sure, it's subjective to the point you call more detail, both polygon and texture wise, less. Which wasn't even the original dev's point, he was just going on about the shield effect's transparency. And it's being diplomatic to pretend it's the original asset (so basically take credit for the new work by presenting it as his own work in both instances? Surely you don't believe that's what he was attempting to do there so why even say that?) but with the wrong alpha transparency and fucked up vs acknowledging it's all new art assets from the polygons to the textures to the sfx. Carry on good sir 
Also, you're mixing up your threads here, showing that you indeed knew about this topic before but are making up stories for some weird reason, I didn't say armchair anything in this thread, lol. And I haven't seen the current Retro staff or other "outside sources" say anything about the door so no idea what you're going on about me just following others' opinions there, you're just going "no you" to what I told the other guy as you're quoting me telling him exactly that about this ex Retro guy
Edit: oh so that was the reasoning behind the making up of that story, to say that you believed the old door was better before the ex Retro dev mentioned it and accuse me of, unlike you, just following someone else's opinion instead. Funny you (or anyone else) didn't think to mention it before him however, but sure, you can claim that, but then claim someone preferring the new door (which I haven't even said I do design wise, you're just projecting again, though obviously it wouldn't fit in the remaster without an equal upgrade to polygons/textures/effects so in that sense the new doors are certainly and objectively more fitting and better for it). I was just against the idea it's fucked up and against making a big deal out of it or pretending this or that preference is some objective truth about this as you call it pedantic nitpick, which I agree it is, but here you are to rekindle it.
And if you are really only going by what you saw here then you haven't even seen the new doors in decent quality yet, but certainly have a strong opinion about them, lol.
Also, you're mixing up your threads here, showing that you indeed knew about this topic before but are making up stories for some weird reason, I didn't say armchair anything in this thread, lol. And I haven't seen the current Retro staff or other "outside sources" say anything about the door so no idea what you're going on about me just following others' opinions there, you're just going "no you" to what I told the other guy as you're quoting me telling him exactly that about this ex Retro guy
Edit: oh so that was the reasoning behind the making up of that story, to say that you believed the old door was better before the ex Retro dev mentioned it and accuse me of, unlike you, just following someone else's opinion instead. Funny you (or anyone else) didn't think to mention it before him however, but sure, you can claim that, but then claim someone preferring the new door (which I haven't even said I do design wise, you're just projecting again, though obviously it wouldn't fit in the remaster without an equal upgrade to polygons/textures/effects so in that sense the new doors are certainly and objectively more fitting and better for it). I was just against the idea it's fucked up and against making a big deal out of it or pretending this or that preference is some objective truth about this as you call it pedantic nitpick, which I agree it is, but here you are to rekindle it.
And if you are really only going by what you saw here then you haven't even seen the new doors in decent quality yet, but certainly have a strong opinion about them, lol.
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