Metroid Prime's 20th release date anniversary is on November 18th. As the anniversary approaches, I'm going to tweet out a little stories about its development. Here is the second story:

In this clip as Samus approaches the Pulse Bombu, the screen fills with static to show interference with her visor. As we worked on this a big issue is the memory use of the noise texture. The Gamecube only has 24MB of RAM, so every texture has to be carefully considered.

If we used a low resolution texture (64x64) to save memory the “static” would be blurry and not crisp. One engineer on the team came up with a great idea: what if we just use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself! We quickly tried it out and it looked amazing.