| This article is written from the Real Life point of view |  |
| “ | We took the control scheme from Metroid Prime 3 and applied it to Prime 1 and Prime 2. | „ |
—Bryan Walker (Developer's Voice) | ||
Walker as he appears in the Metroid Prime Trilogy Developer's Voice featurette.
Bryan Walker is the former Senior Director of Development at Retro Studios. He was Senior Producer for the second and third games in the Metroid Prime series, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and Director of Development for Donkey Kong Country Returns and Mario Kart 7. He was not employed at Retro during the development of the original Metroid Prime, but was the senior producer of its New Play Control! port.
Early career[]
Walker had played Computer Space, the first commercially available video game, when it was first released in the 1970s. He became fascinated by arcade games, and began learning to program with the TRS-80 while also pursuing an Aerospace Engineering degree. After graduation, he served in the Gulf War as a Chief Warrant Officer, flying helicopters. While serving, he saw an advertisement for Gunship 2000 and reviewed it for Computer Gaming World. Walker wrote several more reviews of other games for the magazine, and networked within the gaming industry. As his military service was ending, Walker joined Eidos in a leadership position. He later worked for Origin Systems, where he was hired in 1998, the year Retro Studios was formed. During his career, he had a chance to work with Sid Meier and Richard Garriott.[1]
Before joining Retro Studios in June 2003, he had played Metroid and Super Metroid and greatly enjoyed them. He was only able to play Metroid Prime on-and-off prior to developing the sequel.[2]
Metroid Prime series[]
Walker was concerned about the potential for "sophomore jinx", i.e. the team would take the original Prime's success for granted and put less effort into the sequel. However, this proved not to be the case as development of Echoes began to ramp up, and it was revealed to widespread praise at E3 2004.[2] As Director of Development, he sought to improve development processes to correct the impact of dysfunctional management on Retro during development of Prime, and the "turbulence" caused by Metaforce developers being moved onto Prime.[3] His responsibilities included internal coordination and scheduling, and interfacing with Retro's international development partners and quality assurance teams.[1]
On Retro's decision not to recycle any assets from Metroid Prime for the sequel, Walker felt that it was a challenge few development teams would take on. He was proud of how the team embraced and carried out the task.[1]
Because of his military background, Mark Pacini consulted Walker on the design of the GFMC encampments in Echoes and Corruption. Although he was not credited as a voice actor for Corruption, Walker provided the voice of Trooper 002, who greets Samus Aran when she arrives on Norion. This was a placeholder recording that was retained. Walker was given the role by Scott Petersen, again because of his military service; he remarked that it exposed his sibilant pronunciation of "Stand to, Samus." He had hoped to do more with the Federation, but anticipated a greater role for the organization in Metroid Prime 4.[3]
Walker gave an interview in 2005 to Samus.co.uk, a now inactive fan website. At the time, Corruption was in active development; although he was granted anonymity for his responses, one question addressed him as "Mr. Walker". He explained that Corruption was "about closure, told against the backdrop of an epic struggle.", that Andrew Jones would still be creating concept art, and said that Phazon would play a major role, among other facts. He gave a tour of Retro Studios during this time to GameSpot, which can be viewed here, with a transcript below.
Walker came up with the idea of a compilation of the three Metroid Prime games, resulting in the Metroid Prime Trilogy. He was inspired to do this upon hearing that the Wii (codenamed Revolution at the time) would have backwards compatibility with Nintendo GameCube games. As part of a team of Corruption developers that visited Kensuke Tanabe in Japan in December 2004, Walker proposed a compilation of the trilogy to be released some time after Corruption. The Wii Remote inspired the updated control scheme of the third game, by which point Walker said that Trilogy "seemed like a no-brainer".[2]
He was featured in the Trilogy Developer's Voice featurette on the Wii's Nintendo Channel. He discussed the control scheme from Corruption being applied to the first two games in the series, building on each game, design changes made to the Space Pirates in each installment, the concept and creation of Dark Samus, concerns over how positively the original Metroid Prime would be received, and the creation of the Visor system.
After the Prime series ended, Walker oversaw Donkey Kong Country Returns, which is his favorite project to date. He assisted with early prototyping and engineering for Returns, and coordinated between Retro and EAD on Mario Kart 7. Satoru Iwata joined one of their cross-continent online play sessions, and at one point hit Walker with a Blooper.[1] The Staff Ghost racer for the Wuhu Loop course in Mario Kart 7 was Walker, under the name Ret★Bryan. His best time was 1:44.287, playing as Peach with her Standard Kart, Sponge tires and Peach Parasol, although he had wanted to play as Donkey Kong.[3][4] Walker admitted to being annoyed by the skill of his colleagues, like Tom Ivey and Kynan Pearson.[1]
Walker was interviewed by Kiwi Talkz podcast in 2021, and Shinesparkers in 2022. He also appeared on the latter's podcast in 2023.
GameSpot tour transcript[]
| “ | Hi I'm Bryan Walker, senior producer here at Retro Studios. This is what it looks like out front. Let's head inside.
This is the lobby here at Retro Studios. As you can see on the wall here we've got a lot of hardware that Prime 1 and Prime 2 have brought in for us. With any luck, Prime 3 will be adding quite a bit more. One of the traditions here at Retro Studios are to see who can create the most neurotic whiteboard. As you can see here, this is an engineering whiteboard. People have issues. The bean people have kind of taken over here; I'm not sure what the significance of this is. One of the more important tools of any orderly project management system is visual aids. As you can see here, at Retro Studios we take this very seriously. This is our famous wall of Metroid here. One of our artists, Matt Manchester and some friends took a whole lot of old NES cartridges and painted them in Metroid colors and put this nice little homage to the the whole Metroid pantheon. One of the things that we're really lucky to have here at Retro is, even though we're not a very big team, we've got a lot of space. One of our our core cultures here is really coordination, getting up out of your desk, talking face to face with the other team members, making sure that everybody is understanding very clearly what they're working on, how it fits into the big picture, who's waiting on it, what the specifications are for it. That's a fundamental development discipline. It helps us be more efficient, helps us be focused and helps us create the kind of content that we hope the the players will really like. We're really fortunate that the Wii is a very developer friendly piece of hardware and we also had excellent support, not only from the development support teams at NOA but also NCL in Japan as well. They really gave us a lot of assistance and really helped focus a lot of support on us. It proved instrumental. Our strength is the team. We have fresh-faced freshmen right out of school who have contributed a great deal. We have people who have been in this industry for 20 years who have contributed massive amounts, and everybody in between has done themselves proud. I really want Retro Studios to hold up the Metroid series as this is us, and we are the team and we as a team created something that we're proud of, and we hope that the players enjoy. |
„ |
—Bryan Walker | ||
Subsequent career[]
Walker left Retro in April 2012[1] and subsequently worked at Intific as an Executive Producer of several neuroscience, simulation and education-related projects with partners such as DARPA. He launched a startup independent restaurant, Austin Burrito Company in 2014 and it closed in 2017. Afterwards, he returned to game development with roles at Golden Frog, Imangi Studios and Boss Fight Entertainment. Walker is currently Lead Producer at Deck Nine Games.
Trivia[]
- Walker's favorite Prime weapon is the Seeker Missile[5], and his favorite feature in Corruption is the expanded role of the Grapple Beam, which can now be used as a lasso. The Gunship's new mechanics were a close second for him.[2]
- Walker claimed in an interview with IGN that he was never able to defeat the Boost Guardian boss in Echoes without having to enable debug mode. Years later, he admitted on the Kiwi Talkz podcast that he said this out of frustration, and has successfully killed the Guardian since then.[3]
- His favorite part in Echoes was the Quadraxis battle.[2]
- He felt that Rundas, Ghor and Gandrayda, in contrast to the Bounty Hunters in Metroid Prime Hunters, did not have the "depth" that they deserved.[2] When asked to expand on this, Walker pointed to the rivalry between Samus and Sylux in Hunters, which he believed could be intriguing if developed across a larger storyline.[1]
- From his perspective, Walker sees Samus Aran as "Boba-Fett with a sense of honor," as she is contrasted from Fett and other Bounty Hunters by her nobility and compassion, and because she does not pursue threats simply for a profit.[2]
- Walker recalled meeting Satoru Iwata at E3 2004 while taking a break from demoing Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. While speaking with Mark Pacini and Nintendo employees, Iwata entered the room, bowed and thanked them their hard work on the Echoes demo.[3] Iwata also thanked Walker for his work on Returns, and asked Shigeru Miyamoto if he could recall whether any game had all international versions release early - he could not.[1]
- Walker makes a cameo on track 10 of Harmony of a Hunter Returns, "Prophecy of the Forgotten", voicing the Artifact of Elder hint.
Credits[]
- Out of the Sun - Manual and Testing
- Tank Commander - Pilot's Voice
- Flying Nightmares - Producer
- Team Apache - Original Concept
- Fighter Pilot - Game Design
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Planetary Pack - EA Producer
- Ultima Online: Third Dawn, Lord Blackthorn's Revenge and Age of Shadows - EA Producer
- Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - Producer
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - Senior Producer
- New Play Control! Metroid Prime - Senior Producer
- Donkey Kong Country Returns and 3D - Director
- Mario Kart 7 - Director
Gallery[]
External links[]
- Walker on LinkedIn
- Walker on MobyGames
- Interview with Computer and Video Games
- Interview with Samus.co.uk
- Interview with Kiwi Talkz
- Interview with Shinesparkers
- Episode 26 of The Shinesparkers Podcast
References[]
- ^ a b c d e f g h Interview: Bryan Walker. Shinesparkers. May 6, 2022. Retrieved May 6, 2022.
- ^ a b c d e f g Casamassina, Matt. A Space Bounty Hunter in Texas. IGN. August 28, 2009. Retrieved on October 4, 2021.
- ^ a b c d e Reilly, Reece. "#109 - Bryan Walker Interview (Metroid Prime Trilogy, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart 7, Project Management)". KIWI TALKZ. October 2, 2021. Retrieved December 7, 2021.
- ^ https://www.mariowiki.com/Wuhu_Loop
- ^ Developer's Voice, at 5:57. "My favorite weapon, I think of all the Prime series is the Seeker Missile."