10 Monumental Video Game Plot Twists Nobody Saw Coming
7. A Metroid Makes The Save?! - Super Metroid
An early heartfelt moment in gaming, the end of Super Metroid saw "Baby" Metroid swoop in to save a very wounded Samus Aran and drain the life of the callous space pirate leader, Mother Brain.
After fighting through Ridley, Kraid, and all the other bad things on Zebes, Samus enters Tourian and comes face to face with the Metroid infant (now an adult) she spared at the end of Metroid II, who thinks Samus is its mother. The Metroid nearly kills Samus before realising who she is and then flees.
Samus presses on and battles the Mother Brain, who has the bounty hunter on the verge of defeat when the Metroid attacks it, sacrificing itself in the process and giving Samus the Hyper Beam.
While this twist didn’t have the long, drawn out dramatic build-up of other campaigns, at the time gamers didn’t even fathom the idea that video game narratives could contain any depth or thoughtful writing. Super Metroid was one of the first examples of a video game demonstrating craft in storytelling, and this moment was an early indicator of how video games could tell an engaging and emotional story.