<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>First off, Retro Studios is a second-party company, a wholly-owned subsidiary by Nintendo (just like Rare was, but completely owned and controlled by Nintendo, so it acts more like a development house, just not completely internal). It's made up of a bunch of ex-Iguana team members from Acclaim (they're the ones who originally made Turok). The development house was put in charge of 2 projects: Rune, some action RPG game that was supposed to be really neat, and Metroid. Nintendo knew that the US saved their ass in the last generation and knew that Metroid is HUGE here but not very big in Japan, so they wanted a US group to do it. The took Retro in (they liked what the team was able to accomplish in the past) and got them to work at the two projects. About the middle of 2001 (August, I think), Nintendo got an update on the progress of the two games (not the first, I'm sure) and was pissed. They saw that Metroid wasn't coming along very well at all, so they scrapped Rune, laid off about 3/4 of the people working on it, put the rest on Metroid, and made that THE reason for that development house to exist. The game was VERY important to their US strategy, so much so that they had weekly video conferences with Miyamoto on the development of the game.
Needless to say, they ended up with a pretty good game (one of the top games of the new generation, IMO) and a lot of influence came from Japan, from Miyamoto (now director of ALL game development at Nintendo Japan) and his boys. It wasn't just published by Nintendo through a third-party agreement. It was developed by a second-party team with TONS of input from Japan.</div>
I was there on that fateful day, were you?