‘Metroid Prime 4’ Gets a Release Date After Years of Troubled Development

“Metroid Prime 4: Beyond” is set to release on September 4th and a brand new gameplay trailer. Both were announced during the Tuesday’s Nintendo Direct.

By Megan Farokhmanesh

Jun 18, 2024 05:02 PM

Metroid Prime 4 is alive. During today’s Nintendo Direct event , the company revealed that the highly anticipated sequel, now called Metroid Prime 4: Beyond , is headed to Switch next year.

It’s been around seven years now since Nintendo first made the announcement at 2017’s E3 event, which had the developer Bandai Namco attached. In the beginning, Metroid Prime 4 was expected to fill the gap of ten years between it as well as the 2007 Wii game Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Other games in the series, like Metroid The Other M that received mixed reviews, as did an updated version of Metroid Prime which was released in the interim but none had fulfilled the demand for a fully Metroid game. Metroid Prime 4 was designed to accomplish that, but it didn’t until it was gone.

A few years later and the whole project was scrapped, and relaunched all over again in 2019, after it was unable to achieve “the standards we seek in a sequel to the Metroid Prime series,” Nintendo declared in the moment. Retro Studios, the series creator was enlisted for this sequel to Samus Aran’s return. However, once the work was underway, announcements about the game’s progress was very scarce.

Alongside revealing that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will be out on the Nintendo Switch sometime by 2025. Nintendo has released a gameplay trailer which includes Samus searching for aliens, shooting all around him and becoming a cute little ball. The classics, if you will. A few other details were revealed in the closing of the day’s Nintendo Direct, which also revealed news about a brand new Legend of Zelda game and more, but it was like a flood after the five-year silence that followed it.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond seems to be coming close to the close of the Switch’s lifetime. Information about the next console is a given with each announcement at a Nintendo event, however to date, there’s been no announcements. But, Metroid fans are ready to be greeted by Samus back. As one fan posted on X by posting a picture of the receipt from 2018: “My preorder finally means something!”