GRATEFUL DREAD
Metroid Dread turned out to be a beautiful game. It was much more than its eerie environments and backstory into the origin of the X Parasite. The game was downright fun, which is saying something about a series that has used the same gameplay formula dating back to the original NES days. Samus’s movement of traversing rooms, finding secret chambers, and solving puzzles with upgradable weapon systems was challenging, but so smooth and fluid that its gameplay is what made the game such a sleeper hit.
I haven’t written much about the game because I’ve been watching its evolution since launch day. I played it, loved it, and then watched as speedrunners found glitches and skips to whittle down the any% time to just over an hour (the World Record being a 1:11.13 as of this writing), down nearly 50 minutes from the first couple days the game was released. Not only is this a fascinating process to watch as a game is beaten as quickly as possible, but it also shows the value of iteration and what it means to adjust and improvise depending on what else is found. In many ways I was watching what it means to be creative and discard or amend what existed previously.
Metroid Dread is a game that means so much to so many people. Like a Marvel movie today, connection is key, and to see the Metroid series receive accolades by new players and veterans alike (who fell in love with the likes of Super Metroid in the 90s), it says a lot about what the MercurySteam team was able to achieve.
Hopefully success brings another iteration to the 2D Metroid series because it deserves an encore. But I suppose in tandem, Metroid Prime 4 will need to deliver, which is a strange necessity in order to bring about another addition to the franchise. With a tentative announcement about a sequel to Metroid Dread, perhaps work is already underway for its successor and Samus has no choice but to fly again.
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THE PROBLEM WITH EDITING OLD WORKS…
I’ve run into a problem with editing an older short story. It was written 10 years ago, at a time when my writing skills and story preferences were drastically different. When editing the story today, I’ve found that I’m not only editing a story, but also my older self that wrote it.
I can see a disservice here.
On the one hand, there’s a difference between cleaning up sloppy writing from when I was younger and changing it entirely. With the latter, I’m changing the intent and purpose of the story into something I prefer now. It isn’t a matter of changing the lines, or how events in the story are juxtaposed and delivered, I’m fundamentally changing something into something else.
My argument is that I’m not making it better, I’m making it something I can recognize today.
I’ve always wondered why Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, once said that they would delete the first three seasons of the show. They can’t watch them because, as they claim, the jokes aren’t funny, the pacing too slow, and the storylines are not as sharp. They are correct in a way—those older shows were finding their way, stuck in a time when the show was young and so were the creators’ ideas about what the show would end up being. Does this make those old episodes bad? No—just different from what a South Park episode looks like today. As we become aged with years and experience, we become someone else, someone who cannot fathom being less than the sum of what we are in the present.
From my experiences editing this recent short story, I’m coming to understand why creators/writers/artists do not revisit old works. Turns out, they appear to be made by someone else, and the wiser will not amend any word/paint stroke/film edit because the work was of its time. To make changes means to introduce something new, which falls under any scrutiny the modern audience makes of the work.
I’ll make my changes to this short story, I’ve decided, but I fully understand it exists as something modern and not as it once was when I wrote it ten years ago. I’m fine with that decision because I’ve kept the old draft, the one that I liked best.
I like this new thing, too, but I’m also aware it is something else now.
Not that any of you will know it when the story is posted.
But I thought it worth sharing there is more to the life of a story than what the published version denotes.
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Wishing everyone as well as they can be. You’re not alone out there,
