Why does /vr/ deny that Jet Set Willy created the Metroidvania (which should be more accurately called Willyvania) a full TWO years before Metroid?
>B-BUT MUH ADVENTURE! BUT MUH MONTEZUMAS REVENGE!
Proto-Willyvanias. They paved the way for Jet Set Willy.
>B-BUT NINTENDO NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT
>Iwata recalled, "We examined nearly every game console then on the market, including machines we imported from other parts of the world, such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but none of them had the graphics fidelity we wanted. We came up with the idea for the game pad as we were worried that children could break conventional joysticks too easily. We were a bit obsessive about that; the Famicom's controller buttons were tested with a machine punch and pressed more than 1 million times, and still worked afterward."[45]
>Later when asked about Metroid, Iwata remembered, "Oh yes, I remember a particular game... Gunpei Yokoi was quite taken with it. It was called Jet Set Willy, on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. We had all become familiar with this British hardware during the design phase of the Famicom. Gunpei based much of the gameplay design of Metroid on this game, Jet Set Willy."[46]
>B-BUT JEREMY PARISH SAID
That Jet Set Willy was the first proper Metroidvania:
>While we can trace antecedents of the Metroidvania to games such as Adventure and Montezuma’s Revenge, the real genesis—the Year Zero, if you will—of the genre is found in Matthew Smith’s Jet Set Willy for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Here all the tropes of the Metroidvania are present: the open-ended exploration, the use of items to unlock new areas of the map, the kick-you-in-the-testicles difficulty and the sparse, gloomy atmosphere [...] all of these factors come together to give birth to the Metroidvania as we recognize it today.
—Jeremy Parish, Gaming Historian and expert on the Metroidvania genre
>B-BUT MUH ADVENTURE! BUT MUH MONTEZUMAS REVENGE!
Proto-Willyvanias. They paved the way for Jet Set Willy.
>B-BUT NINTENDO NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT
>Iwata recalled, "We examined nearly every game console then on the market, including machines we imported from other parts of the world, such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but none of them had the graphics fidelity we wanted. We came up with the idea for the game pad as we were worried that children could break conventional joysticks too easily. We were a bit obsessive about that; the Famicom's controller buttons were tested with a machine punch and pressed more than 1 million times, and still worked afterward."[45]
>Later when asked about Metroid, Iwata remembered, "Oh yes, I remember a particular game... Gunpei Yokoi was quite taken with it. It was called Jet Set Willy, on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. We had all become familiar with this British hardware during the design phase of the Famicom. Gunpei based much of the gameplay design of Metroid on this game, Jet Set Willy."[46]
>B-BUT JEREMY PARISH SAID
That Jet Set Willy was the first proper Metroidvania:
>While we can trace antecedents of the Metroidvania to games such as Adventure and Montezuma’s Revenge, the real genesis—the Year Zero, if you will—of the genre is found in Matthew Smith’s Jet Set Willy for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Here all the tropes of the Metroidvania are present: the open-ended exploration, the use of items to unlock new areas of the map, the kick-you-in-the-testicles difficulty and the sparse, gloomy atmosphere [...] all of these factors come together to give birth to the Metroidvania as we recognize it today.
—Jeremy Parish, Gaming Historian and expert on the Metroidvania genre
