Samus Aran had more movements than the machine could remember. Hiroji Kiyotake had drawn them one by one, fine small adjustments to how she turned, stopped and landed. Then the memory ran out. The animations were cut, because, in his own telling, they would never fit. He said he was practically in tears, and that everyone around him pitched in. He did not mind the cuts as long as Metroid got finished.
He was born on December 21, 1960, in Kagoshima Prefecture. He studied visual design at Kyoto Seika University, where he played rugby. In 1983 he joined Nintendo and was placed in Research & Development 1, the department where Gunpei Yokoi worked. By the Japanese record, his first piece of work was the pinball game for the Game & Watch.
Metroid began in 1986 with two people. Kiyotake and one other new employee started it, not Yoshio Sakamoto, as many people assume. Neither of them had made a complete video game before. Kiyotake said that, because of that, they had absolutely no idea what the finished product would look like. The two of them worked on it for not quite ten months. Sakamoto joined only for the last three months, and by then the rest of the department had been called in.
They had a clear idea of what they did not want. Super Mario Bros. had just become a phenomenon, and Kiyotake wanted to make something that had what it did not. He focused on how the character moved. When Sakamoto told him that in Super Mario Bros. you avoid the enemies, Kiyotake pushed back with a question: why do we have to avoid them? The answer became a game where you stand your ground, shoot, and keep exploring.
Then there was the name. Kiyotake loved football, and he named the bounty hunter after a favorite player, Pelé. He said he made the name sound like Pelé's. He believed the full name was Samus Arantes. Sakamoto later pointed out, with a laugh, that the player was Edson Arantes do Nascimento, and that only Aran matched. By then the game had shipped. Kiyotake said he had expected the name to be changed before release. It never was. The planet she lands on, SR388, took its number from a motorcycle engine.
Metroid was released on August 6, 1986, for the Famicom Disk System. At the end of the game, Samus takes off her helmet, and the player learns that the armored hunter is a woman. Kiyotake and the team decided on that reveal together. His other early credits include the Game Boy sequel Metroid II: Return of Samus, where he was director and graphic designer.
The second character came from a development that began in November 1991 and ran until September 1992. Super Mario Land 2 needed a rival for Mario. In the official guidebook interview, Kiyotake said the team imagined him as Bluto to Mario's Popeye. The name came first, and the rest followed. A bad guy is a warui guy, so he would be Wario. The team turned the M of Mario upside down for his emblem. Kiyotake said many other characters were pitched and rejected before this one stayed.
Wario then got his own games. Kiyotake directed Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and the Virtual Boy Wario Land, and was involved in the later Wario Land games. Fans guessed for years that he had modeled Wario on himself. According to Japanese Wikipedia's account of an official Wario Land guidebook, he said that no one close to him resembled Wario. The other staff members all answered with his name. Asked what job suited Wario, he answered: god. After Wario Land 4 in 2001, his credits shrank to supervising and advising, and in 2010 he contributed concept art to Metroid: Other M.
A woman in armor who had to leave out some of her own movements. A rival for Mario named after the word for bad. Both came from someone who, on his own account, did not know what the finished game would look like when he started. If you had waited until you knew how to do the thing, what would you not have begun?