I’ve
lately been spending an embarrassing amount of free time with my 8-bit Nintendo
Entertainment System. I’m trying to find the answer to a silly question: What
happens when you go up or down when you’re not supposed to be able to?

Nintendo
released the game Metroid in 1986,
and it’s since grown into one of the company’s top franchises, with sequels on
just about every console. Along with Super
Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda,
the original Metroid occupies a lofty
spot in Nintendo nerd circles as a landmark title, a revelation. And I don’t
disagree. There’s a certain elegance to the way your character, Samus Aran,
flips from platform to platform in the endless horizontal and vertical shafts
of the planet Zebes.

Metroid was among the
first platform games to present players with one giant world to explore. There
were no levels; linear progression was tossed aside. To reach new areas, you
had to find whatever upgrades (bombs, missiles, the ice beam…) were necessary
to pass certain obstacles. And the gameplay was more fluid than anything ’80s
gamers had experienced before.

While
I can appreciate all that, it’s not the reason why I’m revisiting a game most
people my age (30) haven’t played seriously since junior high. I’m on a quest
to find the Secret Worlds.

I’d
remembered reading about them in a Nintendo Fun Club newsletter ages ago (yeah,
I subscribed), but my limited attention span probably kept me from seeking them
out. There was talk about mastering something called the “door jump,” and if
your timing was dead-on, you’d be able to walk through walls.

It
would be one thing if Samus simply walked off screen; if you could hear her
running about but couldn’t see her. That would imply a game world much larger
than the one actually visible on screen. But in the case of Metroid, perfect “door jumping” actually
leads to untouched game architecture that you can see and explore like any
other area.

Not
that it leads anywhere important. The Secret Worlds don’t contain any hidden
items. Just more platforms to hop around on, enemies to kill, and spaces to
explore. Still, that didn’t stop retro gamers from taking this quest to new
levels of geekiness in the late ’90s, in an endless online discussion still
known as “The Great Secret World Hunt.”

The
questions seemed to rock most of these hardcore gamers to their core: Were the
Secret Worlds intentional? Was Metroid originally meant to be even larger? Was it released in an unfinished state? Or
were the areas nothing more than graphical glitches?

The
debate raged. Metroid fans used door
jumps, emulators, and Game Genies to access more Secret Worlds than ever.
Programmers with too much free time started poking around the Metroid code in
search of a definitive answer. And the discussion got ridiculously deep, taking
in the tile grid of the graphics and the structural patterns of the game.

One
programmer, Kent Hansen (known in online Metroid
circles simply as SnowBro), developed a piece of software gamers could run
on emulated versions of Metroid. It’s
called MetEdit, and it finally revealed how Metroid’s maps were assembled.
Sadly, it also proved that the Secret Worlds were never intentional. They were
merely extraneous map data left outside the game’s normal playing area.

But
MetEdit did more than pop the Secret World balloon. It pointed to ways
programmers could hack into the architecture of their favorite NES games and
shuffle it to create a whole new gaming experience based on the original. Rage
Games was founded, offering emulations like Metroid
X, where the original structure of Metroid is completely revised. The Adventures of
Ice Mario takes the original Super
Mario Bros. and replaces Fire Flowers with Ice Flowers, allowing Mario to
toss ice crystals. Gannon’s Revenge is a reshuffled Legend of Zelda. The Moblin’s Tale allows you to play Zelda as one of your enemies.

So
all was not lost. And the promise of the Secret Worlds is still out there,
glitch or not. The close connections many folks make between these games and
their upbringing makes the quest all the more inviting. What if you suddenly
became aware of an aspect of your youth you didn’t realize existed? What if you
found a way to explore the undiscovered corners of your childhood? You’d
probably take it.

Some links: www.classicgaming.com/mdb/m1/secretworlds.htm has
everything you need to know about the Secret Worlds of “Metroid,” including a
link for downloading MetEdit. www.classicgaming.com/ragegames/main.html
offers a nice selection of hacked NES emulations.

—
Chad Oliveiri

This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2005.